New Year’s Day, time to take inventory in the sports department.
The past year delivered some impressive performances from local teams and athletes. Streaks of perfection and championship runs were extended. Concord was represented, and successful, on national sports stages.
We were also given tales of inspiration, and saw milestones reached.
Normally we rank these top 10 stories, but this year they’re in categories. The first two categories are listed in the order we think is most significant, but the truth is you could mix them up any which way. And who knows, maybe the stories in the last two categories were more important to your year.
With that in mind, here are the Monitor’s top sports stories of 2016.
When you run your winning streak to 120 straight matches, win a fifth consecutive state title and your star is honored as the Player of the Year for a second straight year, you get to the top of this list.
Doug Champagne, the two-time POY for Division III/IV, earned medallist honors at the D-III championships in October with a 75 to lead Bow to that fifth straight title. Champagne went on to win the individual title, and he had plenty of company in the individual portion of the tournament as all of Bow’s top four all qualified – Jack Olsen (80), Ronan Lucey (81) and Colin Plumb (85).
Not only did the Concord High boys’ and girls’ Nordic teams both win their eighth straight Division I titles in February, both did it with perfect scores. Led by individual wins from Kate Andy, Michaela Conery, Nathan Nichols and Ollie Spencer, the Crimson Tide swept the top four spots in the boys’ and girls’ freestyle and classic races for a pair of perfect 788 scores.
Jessica Nelson, Heather Deacon, Jamie Wilkes, Jamie Nelson and Alexander Duncan also scored for Concord in the D-I meet. And the Tide girls’ team also finished first in the New Hampshire Coaches Series Race, which is open to every team in the state from both public and private schools.
The core of the team had just missed out on a trip to the U14 2015 national tournament, but those girls wouldn’t be denied in 2016.
The Concord Capitals claimed the girls’ ice hockey Tier-II New England regional title in March to qualify for the National Championships that had eluded them the previous year before. The team is made up of players from multiple towns, but it’s based in Concord and had five girls from Concord (Isabelle Benoit, Olivia Branch, Darby Palisi, Lil Ricker, Morgan Sission) and three from Bow (Miranda Benoit, Dom Biron, May Anne Wiley) on the roster.
The Capitals beat two teams from Connecticut and one from Maine to claim the regional title. They rolled through their first four games at nationals, which was held in Burlington, Vt., beating two teams from New York, one from New Jersey and another from Colorado by a combined scored of 28-5. The run ended with a 6-0 loss in the semifinals against the Massachusetts-based East Coast Wizards.
Led by goalkeeper Liam Devanny from Concord, the NH Classics U15 team won a national championship at the National Cup in Colorado in August.
“Liam Devanny is probably one of the best goalkeepers in the country that I’ve seen,” said Classics Coach John Price, a former player for Everton in the English Premier League. “There’s no question about that right now.”
Devanny was joined on the team by fellow Concord High sophomore Liam Bennett and Dunbarton’s Max Elasser, who plays for Bow High. The team from New Hampshire beat squads from Minnesota, New York and Texas on its way to the final against New Jersey’s STA Morris United. The Classics fell behind 1-0, but Elasser scored to tie things at 1-1, and New Hampshire eventually hung on for a 3-2 win and the Cup.
Last year Concord’s Justin Toler won the opening set of the boys’ single tennis final but couldn’t find a way to close out the match. This year, Toler finished what he started, claiming the individual title with a 6-4, 6-2 win over Souhegan’s Matt Lapsley. But Toler didn’t stop there.
The Concord High senior teamed with junior Aidan O’Connor to win a second straight doubles title (Toler won it the year before with Thomas Bengtson) to stake his claim as the best high school player in the state. But that wasn’t the only local tennis title.
Bishop Brady’s Sydney Herrington also found redemption in the final by beating Manchester Central’s Julia Chappell (who had beaten Herrington in the 2015 final), 6-7 (5-7), 6-0, 10-5 (a 10-point tiebreaker is used in place of a third set). Herrington became the first-ever girls’ singles champion from Brady and the first Green Giant to win a singles title since John Bunker in 1967.
The Concord boys’ track and field team trailed top-seeded and heavily-favored Pinkerton by four points going into the final event, the 4×400 relay, of the D-I championships in May. But just like they had all day, the boys from Concord exceeded expectations in the 4×400, claiming first place to win the school’s first track title in 36 years.
Matt Adams (second in the 400), Collin Maloney, Dalton Mutz (second in the 100 and 200) and Jamie Wilkes (second 1,600, fourth 800) teamed up to win the 4×400, but there’s no question Concord’s star was Angel Feliz, who finished first in the 100, 200 and long jump.
“We came here to do our best. I came in here positive that we were going to take this win. And we did,” Feliz said. “We made history.”
They’ve been playing basketball at the University of New Hampshire for 113 years, but this year was the first time the Wildcats finished a season with 20 wins.
UNH made it to the America East semifinals for the second year in a row in 2016, lost there for the second year in a row and got an invitation to the CollegeInsider.com Tournament for the second year in a row. But unlike the previous season, where the ’Cats lost in the opening round of the CIT to finish with 19 wins, the Wildcats won their CIT opener, 77-62 at Fairfield, to reach that historic 20th win.
The true measure of UNH’s football success was the Wildcats 13th straight trip to the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs, the longest streak in the country, and New Hampshire’s impressive 64-21 win against Lehigh in the first round. But now all that winning has a fitting symbol – Wildcat Stadium.
A new stadium has been a long-time coming for UNH, which was playing in one of the most outdated facilities in the Colonial Athletic Association yet still managed to attract top recruits and win more than its fair share of games. The project to build a new facility was approved in 2014 and the new place officially opened on Sept. 10 with a 39-28 win against Holy Cross.
The old stadium, Cowell, had 6,500 seats and no luxury boxes or club seats, and just one speaker in the sound system. By comparison, Wildcat Stadium has 11,015 seats, 864 box seats, 512 Victory Club seats, four suites and a 14-speaker sound system.
Running in the Olympic Marathon this summer in Rio was nothing new for Concord High graduate Guor Marial. But running for his native country of South Sudan, and carrying the nation’s flag in the opening ceremonies, was.
Marial competed in the 2012 Olympic marathon in London as an International Olympic Athlete (he finished 47th) because his native South Sudan, a relatively new nation, did not yet have an National Olympic Committee, and Marial was not a citizen in the U.S., his adopted country. He also refused to run for Sudan, the country and government that had been part of the civil war that claimed more than 20 of his family members and eventually forced him to flee Africa.
Even after South Sudan established a National Olympic Committee, it was no sure thing that Marial would get a chance to compete in Rio. He collapsed during a qualifying marathon in Australia, but eventually he was invited to run for South Sudan and carry the new flag for the new nation in one of sports oldest ceremonies. And on Aug. 21 he ran the marathon with a South Sudanese uniform and finished 82nd.
Derek and Dylan Thomson didn’t claim any championships, extend any streaks or compete on any international stages this summer. But the brothers, both former stars for the Concord High soccer team, completed an epic athletic endeavor – bicycling across the country. In the process, they raised around $15,000 for the Connolly Tough Fund to support former Concord principal Gene Connolly in his fight with ALS.
The Thomson brothers followed the same general path their father, Doug, took when he biked across the country 30 years ago raising money for arthritis research. Starting in San Francisco, the Thomsons saw some of the most beautiful landscapes in the country, climbed the Rocky Mountains, survived the desert heat and powered through a debilitating bout of giardia as they pedaled all the way back to New Hampshire.
“You just wake up some days and you don’t want to bike at all. You’re sore, you’re tried, you’re cranky and you want to say, nope not today,” Derek said. “But you’ve got to suck it up and we have been really thinking about Mr. Connolly and how he gets up every day and goes to work even through all his struggles. All we have to do is bike a hundred miles in the hot weather, that’s nothing compared to what he’s going through and that motivates us to keep going.”