Marblehead High junior indoor track captain Thomas Carlson and senior captains Alex Hersey and Isaac Gross all qualified for Boston’s New Balance National Meet earlier this month, with the best of the best also competing for All-American status. The Marblehead trio entered as the “Marblehead Track Club” because the official high school season was over.
Although most states compete in indoor track, some athletes also qualified via outstanding spring marks last year. It was a four-day event that included middle school, freshman and high school-level competitions, and in the end a total of six national high school records fell.
Carlson (6.56.55) qualified for the 60-meter dash. His qualifying time was also good enough to win the NEC Championship Meet last month.
“Tommy is the fastest short sprinter in Marblehead history,” said coach Nolan Raimo. “We often see .15 to .2-second improvement between the junior and senior year, which means Tommy is on pace for an extraordinary senior campaign next year.”
Raimo added, “Tommy ran a 7.11 60 to finish 147th out of 290 competitors at the New Balance Nationals, and he was 51st among juniors. This 7.11 converts to a 6.64 (50-yard dash time), which is only 0.08 behind his best-ever mark. His peak window for sprinting began in February by design for the conference and state championships, and for him to run a quality 60-meter race six weeks past his initial peak window is phenomenal.”
Raimo said that the approach for Carlson for Nationals was to rest him for a week after the Meet of Champions, which had taken place two weeks earlier, before ramping up the following week leading into the Nationals.
“We didn’t want to jeopardize his spring season by overtraining him near the end of the indoor season,” Raimo said. “We treated Nationals more so as a celebration to an incredible season rather than necessarily as an all-in approach.”
Hersey qualified for the 60-meter hurdles via his 7.79 55 55-meter time, which placed him second at the NEC Meet.
“Alex just missed the auto-qualifier in the long jump by 1 inch, which would have been an incredible feat for him to be on the fence for Nationals in two highly competitive events,” Raimo said. “Alex, like Tommy, rested the week following the Meet of Champions. He struggled with groin tightness and illness during the postseason, but he ramped it up the week before Nationals, and like Tommy, we treated it as a celebration to a great season.”
Hersey ran a quality race to finish 102nd out of 231 national hurdlers in the 60-meter event. His 8.50 time converts to a 7.89 55-meter hurdle time, which is only 0.10 off his best time this season.
“The 60-meter hurdles event is a significant change compared to the 55-meter hurdles, as there is space for a sprint to make up or lose time after the fifth and final hurdle,” Raimo said. “While Alex is a phenomenal 55-meter/60-meter hurdler, his strength is in the 110-meter hurdles in spring track, where he is on a mission to run a sub-15.20 to break the school record currently held by Thomas Huber since 2018.”
Gross did not run in the Nationals, even though he qualified for the 5,000 meters after running a personal best 9:27.85 in the 2-mile during the high school season to qualify for it. It was the eighth fastest time in the state this year.
“Following his state championship in the 2-mile, he decided to begin preparing for the spring season,” Raimo said. “Distance running, unlike sprinting, requires a significant ramp up and recovery period to be successful over multiple seasons, so Isaac decided to shut it down after the state divisional meet, which I think is a wise decision that few high school student-athletes have the ability to make.”
