Stan Fryczynski has been the cross-country coach at Secaucus for more than 40 years. And during that time the legendary coach has not only trained a series of excellent teams — the boys have qualified for seven of the last eight state Group 1 meets and the girls in eight of the last nine, but he’s also taught the Patriots the history of many of the courses that they’ve visited.
That came in handy Saturday when the Patriot boys scored an impressive early season win in the Varsity A race at the Xavier Invitational meet held at the historic 2 1/2-mile Van Cortlandt Park course in New York City.
“I’m a teaching coach,” said Fryczynski, who ran the VCP course as a student at New York Military Academy nearly a half century ago and has coached and officiated at dozens of meets at the oldest continuous cross-country course in the United States. “We try and take the kids all over to get them to run different places and get the whole cross-country experience. We usually go against competition that’s probably a little better than us, but it also is great preparation for the sectional meet at the end of the year.”
“This place is special and I actually have the history of the course up on our website and I want our kids to know about it before they get here.”
The Patriots’ veteran boys team has been at VCP several times in the past and showed it with an excellent 2-4-5 finish, propelling them to a 45-75 win over Horace Mann School of New York.
Danny Chinchilla led Secaucus with a second place finish in 14:17.74, with Mohammed Alobaidi (4th,14:34.34) and Sebastian Flood (5th, 14:38.20) close behind. Mohamed Abada was 15th in 15:13.77 and Vishna Naik completed the scoring (26th, 15:40.87).
“We took a little risk today by dropping Abada’s brother (freshman Younes) into the freshman race but sometimes you’ve got to let a freshman be a freshman,” said Fryczynski. Younes Abada easily won the 2,500 meter frosh B race in 8:59.97, fifth fastest of the 273 freshman boys on the course Saturday.
Garfield’s Michael Boyer was eighth in the race at 14:49.60 and his teammate Alfredo Oidor was 20th in 15:31.76. Ryan Pena of Hackensack was 20th in the boys large school race in 14:02.35, leading the Comets to sixth place in the team standings. Secaucus senior Carmelina Sanci was 10th in the girls A race (18:25.52) and Garfield’s Arianna Collado was 14th in 19:11.00.
