3 minute read
Towne Athlete Meet
TOWNE ATHLETE
Chloe McCarthy
St. Mary’s High School Cross Country, Indoor & Outdoor Track
By Tom Worgo
Chloe McCarthy joined the middle school cross country team at St. Mary’s with plenty of enthusiasm. Things were much tougher than expected when running the two-mile race, though. She was challenged by the distance.
“I struggled,” McCarthy recalls. “I was walking a lot during the races. The first race I ran I was wondering why I decided to do cross country.” McCarthy, now a senior, thought about competing in another sport, but through the encouragement of her parents, coaches, and teammates, she decided to stick with cross country.
The 5-foot-9 McCarthy realized she had to work harder and all these years later it has paid off—more than she would have ever expected.
McCarthy, a Davidsonville resident, won the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland Cross Country B Conference championship in mid-October. She finished the race first overall, beating all the elite contenders from the A Conference schools.
“I was at the race and people said, ‘Who is that St. Mary’s girl?’” St. Mary’s Athletic Director Allison Fondale says. “A Mount de Sales runner won it for years and (before that) the runners from Bryn Mawr, Maryvale, and McDonogh. It’s the first time in school history we have had anybody win the overall championship.”
No one, possibly, is happier that McCarthy stuck with cross country than her coach Tom Smith. It surprised him when he heard about her trying times with the sport as a younger student. “She probably has had the most growth of any runner I have coached (in 11 years),” Smith says. “Her parents shared with me the story after the championship. They told how during her freshman year she sat at the kitchen table and cried because she thought she might not make the team.”
McCarthy is one of a kind from the school. She will run cross country and indoor and outdoor track on an athletic scholarship at Mount St. Mary’s University. “She is the only runner on the cross country team in my nine years here that will be running in college,” Fondale says.
Now, McCarthy will focus on indoor and outdoor track, and after those two sports complete her high school career, she’ll run cross country at Mount St. Mary’s. McCarthy, who carries a 3.4 grade-point average, verbally committed to the school in September.
“I went up there three times, and met the girls on the team,” McCarthy says. “The way they talked to me and each other. They felt like a family, like here at St. Mary’s. That was the main thing. And the coach (Catie Jaskowak) is amazing. In communicating, she made me feel included with the team, too.”
Smith expects McCarthy to be highly successful in all three sports in college. She just about outworks everyone and runs 50 miles a week during the
summer and around 40 during the school year. “What makes her such an outstanding distance runner is her dedication to her daily running,” Smith says. “It’s like brushing her teeth. It’s her daily mileage, and the way she exceeds it. She’s more like a runner at the collegiate level with her volume of mileage.”
Mount St. Mary’s will challenge McCarthy much more than high school has. “Her collegiate coach will likely move her up to run steeplechase and 5,000 meters or 10,000 meters on the track,” Smith says. “She will fit into any collegiate program.”
McCarthy will take an impressive resume to college. She also won two of the best races in the state this past fall: the Georgetown Prep and Bullis invitationals. For indoor track, she captured indoor titles in the 1,600 and 3,200.
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