Mason boys cross country won its third state championship in program history Nov. 6.
The championship was the team's first since 2014, making the Comets one of 10 teams in Ohio High School Athletic Association history to win three state championships.
More:OHSAA: Little Miami's William Zegarski, Mason boys team win state cross country titles
The 2021 championship was a few years in the making, and it was a perfect send-off for a group of seniors that worked hard to put themselves in a position to step on the championship podium on the season's final day.
“It is so much fun to see their smiling faces, to see that they learn a great life lesson of teamwork and hard work and delayed gratification and to see that all come together,” Mason coach Tom Rapp said. “The joy on their faces is the biggest reward.”
To reach that joy, Mason had to overcome a 2020 season that might be best defined by Murphy’s Law: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. After taking third place in 2018 and second in 2019, Mason finished 10th in 2020 while dealing with setback after setback.
The adversity started in the summer before the season had even begun. The Comets’ projected No. 2 runner, whom Rapp declined to name for privacy reasons, suffered a brain lesion.
“At one time, he was in really bad shape, in terms of, we were concerned for his life,” Rapp said. “He was in the hospital for a long time and they were still trying to sort things out. He basically lost his senior year of running. He ran a little bit with us. He tried a race or two, but (now), he’s back healthy. He’s in college now and doing well, but that ended his running career.
“So, that was pretty severe. We were really concerned about him. Forget running, just for him to be OK.”
On top of a potentially life-threatening situation with one of the team’s seniors, the Comets had two runners who dealt with stress fractures and another who developed costochondritis, which is an inflammation of the cartilage that connects the ribs to the sternum, according to the National Institutes of Health.
As a trying season neared its end, the injuries kept mounting for Mason. At the regional meet, Issac Schachleiter tried to push through the race despite experiencing some hip pain. During the race, though, he broke his hip not far from the finish line.
Schachleiter had to have surgery and get three two-inch screws inserted into the bone. He was able to recover and rejoin the team this season, where his season included a first-place finish in the Culver Academies Invitational on Sept. 25 and a second-place finish in the GMC Cross Country Championships on Oct. 16.
At the state meet, yet another injury hampered the Comets. Alex DeRoussel tore his hamstring during the state meet and was unable to finish the race. Despite all of that, Mason still managed to will its way to a top-10 finish in the team standings in 2020.
“It was just a litany of issues like that. I don’t know where it came from,” Rapp said. “In some cases, there might have been a little bit of stress of COVID and, ‘Am I going to get quarantined?’
“... It was a train wreck. It really was. In a sense, it showed a little bit of the strength of our program that we were able to finish 10th basically with a B team.”
The Comets had to wait a year for their redemption, but it paid off Nov. 6, when the team stood on the podium to celebrate the perseverance that led to a championship.
“The 2020 year, I think it motivated us,” senior Aiden Amshoff said. “That’s the most important thing that it did. But also, it just taught us a valuable lesson that you can’t take anything for granted.”
The journey to that podium wasn’t easy, though. In the summer, Mason had to show up ready to work toward another opportunity at a title. Rapp said August, the beginning of the season, might be the toughest part of the schedule in some ways.
“By the time we get to August, we’ve hit our peak mileage,” Rapp said. “Normally, we have one meet at the very end of August. This year, we didn’t have that. I just tell them there is no glory in August. There’s a little bit in September when we start running in some races, but the real glory is the end of October into November.”
The team had to come back and work to stay healthy from top to bottom throughout the entire season to earn their glory. They said it’s something they emphasized after everything they dealt with in 2020. Rapp said the focus in training is to make sure the athletes are staying injury-free and illness-free, especially when the postseason arrives.
“The last couple weeks of the season, that’s more important than getting that one last workout in or getting a few more miles in,” Rapp said. “I’d rather have them a little undertrained and hungry and healthy, as opposed to overtrained and ill and a little burned out.”
Healthy and prepared for the state meet, Mason won its championship with six runners finishing in the top 60, led by DeRoussel and Amshoff at 19th and 20th, respectively. Mason’s top two finishers finished within five seconds of each other, with times of 15:40.3 and 15:45.1. DeRoussel and Amshoff credited one another for their top-20 finishes.
“I think we really did a good job of working together,” Amshoff said. “I think it’s one of the main reasons why we ran pretty good races and were able to get on the podium as individuals. He took it out pretty good, and then I want to say around the 1.5-mile mark, I caught up to him, and then I tried to pull him along. Then, around a half a mile left, he passed me up, just pulled me along to the finish. I want to say we both caught probably six or seven guys toward the finish just because he was pulling me along.”
In a race filled with unfamiliar faces, running near a teammate can make a big difference as the miles add up, giving the runners a mental edge. Rapp said it can help them settle down a little bit.
“The fact that they were still running together at the two-mile mark was really good,” Rapp said. “When an athlete can find his teammates in the race and be running with his teammates, I think it has a little bit of a calming effect.”
Not only did Amshoff and DeRoussel finish close to each other, but Keith Neuburger and Jerry Xu both finished within two seconds of each other in 41st and 43rd, while Max Liao and Aidan Markich finished within three seconds of each other. The Comets were the only team in the top 20 to have every runner finish within the top 100 individuals, showing consistency across the board.
“Something we focus on is, with 90-something guys on the team, … we say if everyone does their job, you push the guy ahead of you, who pushes the guy ahead of him, in turn, so on and so forth. It takes a team to win the state championship, so it’s not just the seven guys you see on the podium. It’s 90-plus guys on the team doing the work every day and pushing each other to get better.”
The Mason runners can consider their jobs done for this year.
DeRoussel and Amshoff have one more race ahead of them after being selected to represent Team Ohio in the Mideast Cross Country Championships Nov. 20. For them, it’s another chance to keep building on this year’s success.
“It’s such a cool feeling, just being able to get to represent the whole entire state as one of the top 12 seniors in the state,” Amshoff said. “Especially getting to do it with one of my teammates. It’s going to be an awesome opportunity.”
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