I first would like to thank parents for such great support at our meets this season.  We had another great turnout yesterday at Collegiate.  We had a great weather day yesterday, a little cooler than our first meet, which was great for our distance guys especially.  Thank goodness it was not the deluge of the high school meet a few weeks ago!  And, even though we had some big heats of 20+ in the 1600 and 800 yesterday, props to Collegiate for running a quick meet and getting us done before 6:00 on a weekday.

 

We are in our 4^th straight year of this week being the combo of Collegiate and Timberwolf, so we have tried to mix up the entries for Collegiate and “load up” the Timberwolf meet.  It was great to see some guys try some new events that they have not done since time trials, while also seeing some nice improvement from boys who did an event in meet one over two and a half weeks ago.

 

We had a slew of personal bests with 22 in the running events and 17 in the field events.  There were also 13 elite performances and 3 updates to the record board.  Elex dropped .08 seconds in the 100 to edge out the 14-year old STC MS record in the 100 by .01 seconds, running 11.55.  He then anchored a 4x100 relay team of Tapiwa, Palmer, and Jahmari who ran 48.34, just .7 seconds from breaking the old middle school record (before we ran 47.07 in the first meet).  This quartet from yesterday will go in the 3^rd slot on the record board.  Arun, who is already 2^nd on the record board in pole vault, moved up his 10’9” height to an even 11’0”.  Arun now sits atop the state ranking on MileStat for middle school pole vault.  Elex sits in the #2 slot for both the 100 and 200 and is ranked first in the state for middle school 400 runners.  Our 4x100 team from the first meet that ran 47.07 was passed by a public school in Lynchburg that ran 46.12 last week, but we still sit comfortably at #2 in the state in that event.  Our other relays from the first meet, the 4x800 and 4x400, still sit 4^th and 7^th, respectively, but we look to improve those rankings this coming weekend at Timberwolf and at the upper school meet in a few weeks.

 

Jahmari had a triple elite performance day as did James Pickren.  Jahmari earned elites in the 100 and 200, to go along with his relay team elite.  James P broke 1:00 in the 400 twice, individually and leading off the 4x400 team, and sandwiched a 5-0 high jump clearance in the middle of the meet.  James had a PR of 4-2 a few days ago then went 4-6 in practice and then 5-0 in the meet.  Sam had a nice trio of performances as well, with huge improvements in his shot put (43”) and discus (18 feet) improving to 6^th on the STC MS shotput list and breaking onto the discus list, also ranking 6^th all-time.  He also broke 3:00 in the 800 for his 3^rd PR on the day.  Our throwers continue to look strong, especially in discus.  Along with Sam’s 18-foot PR, Quint had a 13-foot PR, Bryce had about an 11.5-foot PR, Evan had an 8.5-foot PR, and Henry had about a 6-foot PR.  Evan also had over a foot of improvement in shot put to break onto the elite performance list, giving this year’s team 8 of the 24 boys on that list.  Our last new elite performance came in a seldomly run event by our middle school boys, the 300 intermediate hurdles.  There are 8 hurdles each 36” high across those 300 meters, and Palmer dropped over 3.5 seconds from last year’s time to get under the 52-second elite performance time.  Much like Sam in the throws, Palmer is now 6^th on that 300 hurdle elite performance list.  I hope he will also inspire some of his teammates to give the 300 hurdles a try, especially those boys with strong 400 times.

 

In other events, Levon and Hudson each improved over 16” in the long jump, with Levon finding a new event for himself, just shy of the 14-foot mark.  And, speaking of finding new events, we had some massive improvements from boys in distance events that were not too keen on being entered in the 800/1600, but they certainly looked strong.  DJ had a strong 800, dropping almost 7 seconds and getting under the impressive 2:40 barrier.  Bryce had the biggest drop in the 800 with a 31-second improvement.  In the 1600, Carson had a solid drop of 4.5 seconds to break 5:50, Tilghman had a big drop of almost 13 seconds, and Reid had a huge drop of 25 seconds.  Well done guys!

 

Not that we were making entries to maximize our score, but we still won by 100 points, scoring 181.5 to Grove Christian’s 82 and Collegiate’s 68.5 in 3^rd.  Most of Grove Christian’s points came from 3 athletes while Collegiate mainly scored in the field events.  Our score is impressive because it shows scoring in a wide variety of events – throws, jumps, distance, mid-distance, sprints, and relays.  We scored 68.5 in the field and 113 in the running events.  We are looking forward to taking this balanced approach into our toughest meet of the season at Midlothian on Saturday.