By Michael Letendre
For a generation of cross-country runners from Bristol Central, winning the city series championship — every year since 2004 — was like tradition.
Along those lines, the Rams also earned the individual championship as well — a tremendous double dip.
This past Thursday, at the recent city series showdown, one of those streaks was snapped as Eastern defeated Central 24-31 — breaking a nearly twenty years run of dominance.
However, the Rams came away with the individual champion one more time.
This time around, Central’s senior standout, Patrick Wininger, dominated from start to finish, squared up a huge finish in 18:13 to keep that individual tradition going for the Rams.
“It feels really great especially because I’ve had a lot of the guys before me who all won the races, they were all my mentors, my leaders and it feels very fitting to finish the cycle for them and carry it out one last year,” said Wininger.
“Trick” is the captain of the squad, a model student at BCHS, who achieves at the highest level — inside and outside of the classroom.
He even has a better head of hair than the principal from the school currently sports.
And to keep that tradition of having the individual winner come from Bristol Central is an impressive feat.
“We wanted to try to keep that tradition going,” said Central coach Tamara Stafford-Kirk. “It’s just been these guys feeding off of each other. It started off [in 2004] and it just has blossomed from there.”
“These guys really put a lot of weight on that, and they are really proud.”
That tradition started in 2004 when the Rams defeated the Lancers 19-42 back on Oct. 2 from Page Park.
The winning runner was Kyle Langlais with a finish of 17:25 — six seconds better than Eastern’s Tony D’Amato (17:31).
And that started a 20-year odyssey of Central’s top harriers winning the city series individual title.
In 2006, it was Alex Romano with a top time of 16:04 at the course from St. Paul Catholic (2.9 miles). He repeated the feat in 2007 with a finish of 16:54.
In 2010, at Page Park, it was Connor Kelley (17:00) as Central was showing its running dominance. Later that season, the Rams captured the Class L Championship.
One year later, Central’s Jacob Eschner (18:23) won the city series title from Rockwell Park.
The list goes on and on with Spencer Johnson (2012, 17:45.6), Josh Signore (2014, 18:20), Matt Barnum (2015, 17:29) and Matt Roy (2016, 18:08) all seizing top individual honors.
From 2017-2019, it was all Matt Petrosky (2017, 17:45.2; 2018, 17:09) and over that final meet, he established a then new course record at Rockwell with a finish of 17:13.1 overall.
Nate D’Angelo, shattering the course record at Rockwell during the pandemic, winning the race in 2020 as freshman Patrick Wininger was getting his feet wet and then the last two seasons, it was all Frankie Porrini. (18:21 in 2021 and 17:16 in 2022).
Now, Wininger joins a list of who’s-who from the boys cross country program at BCHS.
“To do that at home for [Wininger] was just really exciting,” said Stafford-Kirk. “This was really hard-earned for Patrick. When he came in as a freshman, high school cross country was a big adjustment for him. They were days where he was like ‘I’m just not sure if I could do this’ and he just started to gain confidence.”
“He’s just awesome. It’s been a really, really exciting four years for him.”
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