Marshall team (L-R) Colin Detwiler, Nate Nicoletti, Garrett Sparks, Finneas Anderson, Alek Boschetti, Beckett Sparks, and Adam Schneider (Photo – Guo Ghiloni)
On the mild morning of Saturday, Nov. 22, 2025, in the small town of Walnut, California, 1,195 high school runners from around 200 schools gathered, awaiting the start of their race. Among them, only seven runners and one team represented a Pasadena public school.
By Paolo Calchi Novati
The Thurgood Marshall Secondary School boys’ varsity team was the only team from the Pasadena Unified School District to reach the CIF Southern Section Finals this year. The races took place at Mount San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) on a 3-mile course, with Marshall’s race starting at 9:05 a.m. The team competes in Division 4.
The Marshall team included freshman Beckett Sparks (who finished in 16:55), sophomores Finneas Anderson (16:24), Alek Boschetti (16:08), and Colin Detwiler (15:57), juniors Adam Schneider (17:02) and Garrett Sparks (16:17), and senior Nate Nicoletti (15:27). This season, the team was coached by Eric Hultquist and Teacher Coach Jessica Maker-Bilzandzija, an English teacher at Marshall. Both assumed their roles last year.
Marshall placed eleventh out of the 16 teams in Division 4, narrowly missing a spot at the state championships (they needed at least a seventh-place finish). Despite this, the team exceeded expectations, outperforming their predicted thirteenth-place finish, with six out of seven runners setting personal records.
Coach Hultquist noted that the team took a “conservative” approach to the first mile before making their move in the second. “Over the second mile is really where we made our move. As a team, we moved up four spots to eleventh,” he said.
“I thought the team did amazing. That’s obviously our best race of the season,” said Nicoletti.
With his time of 15:27, Nicoletti set a new 3-mile all-time record for Marshall, surpassing his own record from the previous week during the CIF Prelims on the same course, where he finished in 15:42.
Due to last week’s rain, which made the traditional hilly dirt course unsafe, the races were not held on Mt. SAC’s usual terrain. Instead, an alternate, flatter cement course was used. Runners completed each race with a roughly 300-meter stretch across Mt. SAC’s track.
While many of the Marshall runners agreed that the flatter course helped them achieve faster times, Schneider felt that the “flat SAC,” as he called it, worked to their disadvantage.
“We as a team are comparatively better at hills than others, and so if we had run the true course, we would’ve had a much more competitive chance of making state,” he said.
“At the beginning of the year, we knew we wanted to make it to this race and have a shot at making state,” Coach Hultquist said. “For this season, I couldn’t be more proud or happy about how they did.”
Marshall finished second in the Mission Valley League this year, behind Arroyo High School.
Paolo Calchi Novati is an aspiring sports journalist and editor for his school’s newspaper at Thurgood Marshall Secondary. He’s also involved in the chamber orchestra, mock trial, and tennis team.
Start of the race (Photo – Guo Ghiloni)
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