The Essex County Track Coaches Association announced a major change to their local cross-country schedule this season.
The ECTCA Invitational, which runs at Branch Brook Park, and Essex County Championships, which has mostly run Brookdale Park since 2009, will both be moving to Cedar Grove Park starting this season.
In conversation with NJ MileSplit, ECTCA representative John Schwarz explained the move was primarily for the safety of the athletes.
The [Branch Brook Park] course crosses the road twice and parking lot entrances multiple times. In recent years due to declining police availability and difficulty holding up the increasing traffic, the roadway around the side of the park was becoming too dangerous for both coaches and athletes.
It was also mentioned the running surface, outside of the grass start, is mostly on hard-packed macadam. Making the race more of a road race than a cross-country race.
"The new course while still largely on macadam paths, has about 30% on grass, certainly an improvement," stated John Schwarz, "Although there is no killer hill on the course, there is a good deal of undulation, making the course a little more challenging than Branch Brook Park or Brookdale Park."
While the Branch Brook Park course has been used for cross-country racing since the early 1900s, the course has understandably seen several changes throughout the years.
Essex County Championships has run both the Branch Brook and Brookdale locations, however since 2009 it has primarily competed at Brookdale Park to mix up the schedule after the formation of the Super Essex Conference which brought weekly meets to Branch Brook.
Recent construction caused increasing difficulty in maintaining the Brookdale course layout, leading the coaches to vote for exploring new locations.
In mid-August a group including John Tonero, John Schwarz, and coaches from Verona, Cedar Grove, Livingston, and Montclair met at Cedar Grove Park to determine a possible course layout and have been fine-tuning it since then.
The final layout has been determined and a course map and description will be released soon. NJ MileSplit will update this story with the map and description once available.
The Essex County Track Coaches Invitational is scheduled to race the new course on October 19th.
Note that the SEC Championship will be at Branch Brook Park for this year, that meet's future location will be determined after seeing how Cedar Grove Park performs.
The current boys' course record at Branch Brook Park is held by Matt Grossman of Millburn HS, who won the 2016 Super Essex Conference race clocking 15:26.60. The girls' record has been held since 2013 by Amanda Corbosiero of Mount Saint Dominic Academy when she won Super Essex running 18:27.10.