Cornwall wins OCIAA girls track title, Riccardi leads dominant meet

Cornwall turned the OCIAA girls track and field championships into a team race it controlled from multiple directions, piling up 163.5 points at Warwick Valley High School to beat Monroe-Woodbury’s 134 and Valley Central’s 63. Madison Riccardi was the meet’s engine, winning the 100 hurdles, 400 hurdles, triple jump and long jump as Cornwall repeated as county champion and backed up its 2025 title, when it finished with 151 points.

The two-day meet, scheduled for Friday at 1 p.m. and Saturday at 9:30 a.m., sat in the middle of Section IX’s outdoor track calendar and carried real postseason weight. The OCIAA championships at Warwick served as a checkpoint before the Section IX meets later in May, the June 3-4 state-qualifier days and the NYSPHSAA state meet June 13-14 at Webster Schroeder High School.

Cornwall did not need one single monster event to separate itself. Riccardi’s four wins spread points across both hurdle races and both horizontal jumps, while Olivia Cibirka added another title for the Green Dragons in the steeplechase. That kind of depth mattered against Monroe-Woodbury, which kept itself in contention with Olivia Heim’s sweep of the 400 and 800, but could not match Cornwall’s broader scoring across event groups.

The county also produced several standout individual marks that showed how deep the field was beyond the team standings. Minisink Valley’s Ella Michelitch cleared 6 feet in the high jump and came close to the state standard. Valley Central’s Dayna Scott repeated as 100-meter champion and added the 200, while Tri-Valley’s Anna Furman won both the 1,500 and 3,000. Kingston’s Tiffany Hajba took the discus.

By the end of the meet, Cornwall had done what championship teams do best: score everywhere, not just in one specialty. Monroe-Woodbury stayed close enough to make it a contest, but Riccardi’s versatility and the Green Dragons’ spread of points across sprints, hurdles, jumps and the steeplechase gave Orange County another clear county champion heading into the next round of the postseason.