'Always striving' New Town pulls off big upset

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Small-town high school cross country teams dot the U.S. map like a constellation but rarely does their performance cause the ripple that the boys from New Town, N.D. made last Friday.

For a day, at least, the Class B school with 150 students had to feel like the best team in North Dakota after toppling 10-time defending Class A champion Bismarck with a sixth-man tiebreaker at the Stavn-Anderson Invitational. MEET RESULTS

That's right. New Town used its depth, it's sixth guy, to beat a really good team from a school almost 10 times the size.

It might not reach the level of Milan over Muncie Central in the 1954 Indiana State Basketball Tournament -- the real-life David vs. Goliath legend that spawned the movie "Hoosiers" -- but New Town's victory should strike a chord with small-school underdogs everywhere.

“We are always striving to get heard and (be) known,” New Town junior Ryan Wheeling said. “Hard work is paying off after all these years.”

New Town is no stranger to success, which has fed a robust running culture at the school for at least 30 years. Syd Lahtinen won back to back state Class B titles in 1985 and 1986 and his team won the championship both years as well.  

New Town has won nine Class B state championships in 11 years under the watchful eye of Brian Anderson. The other two years, New Town finished second. Now in his 12th season, the coach is working with a group that may prove to be his best yet.

Friday’s victory over Bismarck was a new high water mark. Bismarck, with an enrollment of about 1,400 is the dominant program in the state. It turned out star Jake Leingang (top-five at Foot Locker in 2011 and 2012) and also qualified for NXN in 2008 and 2012.

New Town matched Bismarck at the Stavn-Anderson Invitational with 41 points. Sixth runner Daniel Lebeau finished four spots and 10 seconds ahead of Bismarck’s sixth man to break the tie. It was the first time that a North Dakota team has beaten Bismarck since 2004.

“(The boys) were excited,” Anderson said. “It was a big deal to them to do well against the best team in the state.”

The core of New Town’s team is strong and getting stronger. With a top five of Jalen Chase, Wheeling, Chace Hale, Joe Chase and Jaiven Hale this could be the school’s best team ever. Jalen Chase and Wheeling expect to run under 16 minutes for 5,000 meters this fall and the other three can run within a minute of those two. Joe Chase is the team’s lone senior.

“New Town had a strong tradition of good teams, three boys state titles and a couple of girls titles, before I got here,” Anderson said. “The tradition was something that spurred kids to come out. My part of it is pretty easy.”

Wheeling, though, said the coach deserves a lot of the credit.

“He expects things out of us but he doesn’t have to say it,” Wheeling said. “We know what he expects. All he says is ‘Do what you can.’ If we’re doing what we can, we’re doing things right.”

New Town, which is located on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, got its name in 1950 when a couple of small towns on the banks of the Missouri River were relocated to higher ground so that the Garrison Dam could go in. The dam created the reservoir Lake Sakakawea and inundated the previous town sites.

The town has been transformed again – like almost everything else in Western North Dakota – by the oil boom. Drilling into the massive underground Bakken Rock Formation has change the economy, created thousands of high paying jobs and swelled populations beyond capacity. North Dakota oil wells are pumping a million barrels of crude oil per day and there is no end in sight.

This phenomenon has little effect on New Town cross country, except for the increased truck traffic. Gravel roads that lead out of town used to be part of the team’s training landscape. The team has been forced to move to safer locations, like the bike path near the lake and the golf course.

The families that feed into the current cross country team were already here before the oil boom. But now their community buzzes with activity – and Highway 23 has become a traffic jam.

“From a school standpoint, things have increased,” Wheeling said. “There is a new gym and they’re expanding the school. We have a real hotel now. Businesses are doing better.”

New Town’s population has grown from about 1,700 to 2,400 in seven years (stuffed into 1.2 square miles), although the enrollment numbers at the high school have upticked only slightly.

It is still a starkly remote place with bone-chilling winters. The average low temperature in January is minus-3 degrees.

Last spring, the members of the cross country team watched the movie “McFarland” about the blue-collar work ethic of a small-town team in California.

Talking about it afterwards, the part of the story that felt the most familiar was the depiction of the coach.

“We see our coach being like (McFarland coach Jim White)," Wheeling said.

Like McFarland, the New Town cross country team is building its identity as a winner one meet at a time.

And the victory against Bismarck is only the latest benchmark. The Eagles will get several more cracks at the state’s biggest schools before the state championships.

“For us, (beating Bismarck) was a confidence booster,” Anderson said. “They felt they could run against the better teams in the state.”