All-Delco Cross Country: Fingerhut, Schwelm overwhelm as county’s best runners
UPPER PROVIDENCE — Penncrest’s Ruby Schwelm and Haverford High’s Ethan Fingerhut were destined to be runners.
Both come from running families.
Schwelm’s father, Bob, became an accomplished distance runner after playing soccer in college at Franklin & Marshall and is the co-owner of the Bryn Mawr Running Club.
“It’s nice having him there, my own coach,” Ruby Schwelm said of her father.
Fingerhut’s father, Randy, ran track in high school and his older brother, Josh, was a two-time All-Delco selection in cross country for the Fords, who now runs track and cross country at Washington & Lee University in Virginia.
“They’ve been running my whole life,” Ethan Fingerhut said. “I picked up on it.”
This year, Schwelm, a freshman, and Fingerhut, a senior, took their careers to new heights, earning medals at the PIAA Class 3A cross country championships and being named Runners of the Year to highlight the 2021 Daily Times All-Delco Cross Country team.
Joining Schwelm and Fingerhut on the All-Delco team are: Rowe Crawford, Hannah Prokup and Gwyneth Stach from Strath Haven, Camryn McGeehan of Haverford, Therese Trainer of Notre Dame and Kathryn Lynn from Episcopal Academy for the girls; Haverford High’s Patrick Lawson and Quentin Ryan, Luke Rodden and Jimmy Kutz from Radnor, Gavin Mogck of Penncrest and Strath Haven’s Benjamin Ent for the boys.
The team was selected by the Daily Times sports staff after consultation with county coaches.
Crawford and Trainer are the only repeat selections from 2019, the last time the team was chosen. Crawford, Lynn, Stach, Kurtz and Ent are seniors. Trainer, Ryan, Lawson and Mogck are juniors. Prokup and Rodden are sophomores and McGeehan is a freshman.
Schwelm is the first freshman to earn Runner of the Year honors since Sacred Heart’s Emma Seifried in 2014 and the first female from Penncrest to receive the honor since Chrissy Boyd went back-to-back in 1998 and 1999.
Fingerhut is the third Haverford athlete to earn Runner of the Year honors on the boys side, joining Mike Donnelly (2018) and Ed Donnelly (2009), who are not related.
As a freshman running varsity for the first time, Schwelm said she didn’t have high expectations, yet she went out and won the first three races of her career. She won the Northampton Invitational and took first in the only two Central League dual meets she ran in.
“I just wanted to see how things went,” Schwelm said “I ended up doing better than expected.”
Schwelm went on to finish sixth at the Paul Brown Invitational with a personal best time of 18 minutes, 23.10 seconds. She followed that with a second-place finish at the Delco Championships, a victory at the Central League Championships and a 20th-place at the District 1 Class 3A championships even though she was a bit under the weather.
“I surprised myself,” Schwelm said.
She wasn’t done. A week later Schwelm took 19th at the state meet on the difficult course in Hershey to become the first Penncrest runner to medal at the state meet since Kim Baxter took 18th in 2000 at Bucknell.
“It was pretty hard,” Schwelm said of the state course. “I knew it was going to be hard going into it, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. (At) Districts I had a really bad week. I was not feeling well that week. But states, I liked the course and I was happy with the way I ran.”
Like Schwelm, Fingerhut did not have high expectations entering the season and that didn’t change after the first Central League dual meet of the season, where he finished fourth behind Lower Merion’s Sarem Kahn and Simon Schmeider and Ryan.
Eventually, though, his outlook changed.
“I had a pretty good year sophomore year, but last year I had a really bad year,” Fingerhut said. “I didn’t know how good I could be until this year. I wasn’t expecting to win Delcos and Centrals but when it did happen I wasn’t too surprised. I started to gain confidence toward the end of the year.”
Fingerhut won Delcos by 18 seconds and Centrals by six seconds over Lawson, and was edged by Hatboro-Horsham’s Brian DiCola by four-tenths of a second at the District 1 Class 3A championships. He got his revenge a week later with a fourth-place finish at the PIAAs in Hershey. He was the top finisher from District 1.
It was the best finish at the state meet by a Delco boys runner since Kevin James of Cardinal O’Hara took second in 2014. It was the top performance by a Haverford boy since Josh D’Angelo was third in 1990 and only the third top-10 finish by a Ford in the last 31 years. Aaron Rich was eighth in 1997.
“This year I had more fun in cross country that I did in spring track mainly because I was winning and we had a really good team,” Fingerhut said.
The Fords won the Delco meet title and finished fifth as a team at the district and state championship meets, topping league rival Lower Merion in Hershey. Fingerhut credited the daily competition he received from his teammates, specifically Lawson and Ryan, for helping him have the successful year he had.
“We pushed each other,” said Fingerhut, who is looking at Penn State, Pittsburgh and American as well as other schools. “We trained together every day. Even if we didn’t have an organized practice we’d meet up on our own and make sure we got in a run and that helped us to be successful.”
