The 2020 Class of the Greater Mount Airy Sports Hall of Fame inducted its youngest athlete yet, but also one of its most worthy.
Kirsten Parries is one of the most decorated female runners in Surry County history. Between running cross country and multiple events in track, she was awarded all-conference honors 19 times in four years. That’s right, 19 times in two sports in four years.
She won a conference championship 13 times and finished second four more times. Moving on to the regional level, she won three regional races and took three gold medals at the 1A state championships, setting one state record that still stands eight years later.
Kirsten may be just 24 years old and just six years removed from graduating Mount Airy High School in 2014, but five years is long enough to qualify for major sports honors.
Humble start
Surprisingly, Kirsten’s beginnings as a runner didn’t go as planned.
She actually had played basketball in middle school. In the sixth grade she looked up to eighth-grade star Jordan Hiatt (who is also a member of the Class of 2020 for her career at Mount Airy High School and Lenoir-Rhyne).
Kirsten said by the time she got to high school she was feeling burned out on basketball, but she was always there at games to show her support in the stands.
Jordan, then a junior, had gotten into running cross country to stay in shape for basketball. She encouraged Kirsten to run with her.
“At the first race, I was so excited, I tried to go out at her speed,” she recalled. “I was running and feeling great.”
But, the races are 5,000 meters, or about 3.1 miles.
”By the 2-mile mark, I’m exhausted,” she said. Running at Fisher River Park, there is a section where the teens run up a hill and are out of sight of the parents before working their way back around the course.
After trudging up that hill, Kirsten said she didn’t think she could make it another step. She sat down on a log and wondered whether she should just quit. After about 15 seconds, she got back up and continued on.
She finished the race, but about three and a half minutes behind Jordan, who finished fourth.
Just six weeks later at the Northwest 1A/2A Conference Championship, Jordan took second, and Kirsten was third — a whopping five and a half minutes faster than her first race.
Two weeks later at the 1A Midwest Regional, Kirsten was 50 seconds faster than Jordan and qualified for the state championship, where she finished sixth in all of 1A. Quite a lot of growth in a short time.
Super Sophomore
In the 10th grade, she took first place in cross country at the 1A Midwest Regional and then won the gold at the 1A State Championship.
However, she said what she remembers most is track season with her teammates, especially Jordan, a senior all-state basketball star; Davi Barbour, a sophomore starter on the state champion tennis team (and possibly a Hall of Fame one day); and Alex Mayes, a senior who was the conference champion in the 400 meters.
As a distance runner, she naturally ran the 1,600 meters and 3,200 meters (roughly 1 mile and 2 miles). But she also ran the 4x800m and 4x400m relay races.
“It was so much more energizing being part of a team,” she said. “We can all share a win together. You have that special bond with all your teammates that I love.”
The 4×800 relay team blew away the competition in the Northwest Conference Championship with a stellar time of 10:05. They also did well individually.
Jordan took third place in the high jump and first place in the 800 meters seconds ahead of Davi. Parries took first place in the 1600 and 3200 meters. Alex took first place in the 400 meters.
In the regionals, the Lady Bears were beaten by one of the charter/magnet schools: Gray Stone Day School.
They would square off again at the state level.
At that state meet, Jordan finished sixth in the 400 meters, and Davi was fourth in the 800 meters.
Then in the relay race, Davi set off with a blistering pace, then came Alex giving it her all as it was her only event of the day. Jordan pushed hard through her leg and handed off to Kirsten.
“Every one of us ran a personal best,” said Kirsten. In the final turn, she saw she was behind the Gray Stone runner by probably 50 meters but she was gaining.
She saw Coach Donald Price (who died in 2016 from cancer) at the bottom of the stands outside the track.
“Coach Price was standing there at the corner screaming at me, ‘You got it! Go, go!’”
“People I competed against all season were cheering me on so hard,” she said with wonder. Her teammate Alex came back down the inside of the track on the grass and was running alongside Kirsten yelling encouragement.
“It was like everyone was rooting for me, and I was running as hard as I could.”
In that last 100-meter stretch, Kirsten made up that 50-meter deficit and lunged across the finish line a split-second faster. Mount Airy was a whopping 23 seconds faster than the regional race. Both teams broke the previous state 1A record, and Mount Airy still holds the mark for the fastest time.
As if that wasn’t dramatic enough, this wasn’t the only close finish of the day for Parries. She also won the 2-mile race by just a second and a half after once again coming from behind on the last straightaway. She beat Erin Brooks of Hendersonville with a time of 12:10.51 to 12:11.89.
Upperclassman
In her junior and senior years, Kirsten continued to dominate all public school competition. But, charter/magnet schools became a bigger problem, especially a new rival in Malia Ellington of Community School of Davidson.
Ellington would take the state cross country title the next two years. She also would sweep all three distance events at the state track and field meet in 2013, earning gold in the 800, 1,600 and 3,200.
Kirsten actually held out of the 1,600 to rest for the 3,200, but still couldn’t stop Ellington, who graduated with 17 gold medals, state records in the 800 and 1600, and a track scholarship to Harvard.
In her senior year, Kirsten earned a Time Warner Cable Scholar-Athlete of the Week Award, was named the Northwest Conference runner of the year, and then at the end of the year the overall conference female athlete of the year.
Looking back now, Kirsten admits that she was focused more on athletics than academics her first two years. She didn’t make bad grades, she just didn’t give it her best. By her senior year she was taking dual-enrollment courses, earning credit for high school and Surry Community College.
After graduating in 2014, she took a year at SCC to get ready to matriculate to UNC Chapel Hill.
In May 2015, Kirsten was named one of recipients of a Edward M. Armfield Sr. Foundation Scholarship. The same month, the Mount Airy Board of Education recognized Kirsten for her volunteer efforts, noting she had put in 88 hours of time.
A career
By 2017 she graduated college with a bachelor’s degree in nursing and became a registered nurse.
She spent a year in Novant Presbyterian Medical Center in Charlotte. Then in July 2018 she moved to New York City.
“I love the city,” she said. “For the past two years I’ve been working at Mount Sinai Hospital. I currently work in the pediatric ICU.”
Still not satisfied with her education, she has begun taking classes this fall through New York University to earn a master’s degree in nursing so she can become a pediatric nurse practitioner.
”I definitely like working with the kids. It’s so fun. … It’s so rewarding to see them get better … especially when they are there for a long time, or they are there frequently for a long time.”
As if work and school aren’t enough, she and her high school sweetheart are planning a wedding. After eight years together, she and Dylan Wright will be tying the knot — at some point.
What was it like being a nurse working in NYC during the COVID-19 pandemic?
“It was an experience to say the least,” she said. “In March it really spiked. The hospitals, they were overflowing. They built three units in the atrium and lobby here. They put up these huge tents across the street and in Central Park.”
She said volunteers from churches and other groups would come to offer their help.
Her pediatrics ICU was converted to working with virus cases.
“They made it an adult unit temporarily,” she said. In fact, all such specialized units in the hospital were converted to handle the overflow of sick people.
Then there were other other issues that came with the mass of people. The nurses ran out of protective gear, and there were conflicting reports about how the virus could be passed from person to person. There wasn’t enough equipment to go around to diagnose and treat patients.
So many people died in a short period of time that the morgues couldn’t hold them all, she said. A refrigerated 18-wheeler pulled up to the hospital, and the dead were hauled out to the truck for lack of room.
Kirsten would work shifts from 7 a.m. one day to 7 a.m. the next day, hopefully with time for a nap somewhere along the way.
It was so bizarre leaving the hospital at 7 a.m. because normally there would be 1,000 to 2,000 people roaming the sidewalks of Madison Avenue and Park Avenue, but suddenly there was no one out at all, she said.
The community support was nice, though, she said. While the sidewalks were bare at 7 a.m., one morning lots of people just getting up in the morning opened their windows and beat on pots and pans to cheer the workers leaving their shifts. It was a welcomed touch to the weary staff, and it was repeated several mornings.
Hearing a crowd of people cheering for her is nothing new for a star athlete, but now it adds even more meaning.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com