‘Our first year (1991), we had 275 runners and something like 10 volunteers...’ Grossman said. ‘Now we have a list of around 400 (volunteers)...’

Grossman had watched his daughter Emily run for Thetford at the New England cross-country championships at Derryfield Park in Manchester, NH, in November of 1990, and learned that Vermont would play host to the 1992 New England meet at ‘a site to be announced.’

Barely four months later, Thetford Academy won the right to play host to the New England championship, and the planning began. Soon, Thetford resident John Morton, a two-time Olympic biathlon skier and coach-turned designer of trails for cross-country running and skiing, started prowling the acadeemy’s existing course through the state park-’About two-thirds of it was on the state park road and the rest was deer paths between the trees,’ Grossman recalls- and looking for ways to make it truly cross the country.

After mud season, the work began...At the end of August, bulldozers cleared out the last of the stumps, just in time for the Academy’s first home meet.

‘We don’t run any other courses like it,’ New England champion, Meghan Owen of Killingly, Connecticut said. ‘It’s all in the woods, rolling hills.

It’s a challenging course, and there’s always a lot of good competition. It’s good to run with the best.’”