I hope everyone who attended the state meet has dried out by now.  We were thankful to have those two big team tents and parents supporting the kids by shuttling them home and back to the meet, depending on their meet events.  After basically standing for 12 hours in the rain from 7:30am to 7:30pm, I made a quick pit stop home to help bathe my kids and get them to bed, before heading to STC to drop off the tent in the field house to dry and also dry out all the spikes and rollers around 10:30pm.  Thank you to Coach Dunn for being there every step of the way, even that late night trip to school to hang out the items to dry.  Thank you to all the boys and parents who braved the weather, and also to Coach Bey for being there for the throwers.  I know that was a miserable day, but we had to make the best of it.  Although I am convinced a better weather day would have put us in a better mental place to perform well, this was a good experience for the boys to not only deal with weather, but also deal with the high-powered setting of a state meet, something they will experience no doubt on the upper school track team.  Plus, after beating up on most of the teams we competed against this year, it was a humbling experience to go up against the fierce competition that this meet offers.

 

The weather made personal bests hard to come by, but in a state championship meet, the focus can shift from PRs to beating people around you for team points.  We did have double PRs from both Eli and Freddy as they had PRs in the 4x800 relay to start the day and also the 4x400 relay to end the day.  Davis, our only indoor track representative at the state meet, also added an 800 PR, moving up to 7th on the STC MS all-time list in the 800 with his 2:13.45.  This time would have put him 4th (school scoring division) in the individual 800.  The A team had a great time thanks to those PRs from Eli and Davis, as well as Aidan's 2nd best time ever in the 800.  Jahmari, the only carryover from last year's state champion 4x800 team, had a solid leadoff leg and this squad finished in 3rd place overall, logging the 5th fastest 4x800 time in STC MS history.  Our meet record from last year was just ahead of this year's winning team, so Jahmari remains a member of that state record team from last year.  Our B team got some valuable experience and finished in 10th place overall.

 

The 4x100 team has been looking good all year, but this meet we tried a new order, which we normally would not do, but we thought it would be faster.  This squad outran every other team, but the handoffs were not as sound as they typically were earlier this season.  The rain, state meet atmosphere, very close teams to us, and crowd noise, all made it a challenge, but they got the job done thanks to a big rundown from Elex in the final straightaway to get the team from 3rd to 1st.

 

The 4x400 team also earned a top-3 medal with a 3rd place finish.  The team that ran 3:39 earlier this season ran 3:47, good enough for the 2nd fastest time in STC MS history.  Aidan was near his PR and Elex once again had an impressive finish, needing another few inches to pull off a 2nd place finish.  He ended up .005 seconds behind the 2nd place team's anchor, yes 5 one-thousandths!  His split of 51.82 is the 2nd fastest he has ever run in the 400, so he gave all he had after already running the 4x1, 400, and high jump.  Our B team did well with Freddy and Eli's PRs to go with solid times from James P and Jelus.  This team was close to a top-6 medal with an 8th place finish, about 6 seconds from the last medal slot.  If anything, having a B team run a 4:05 was a bit of a "flex" on just how good our 400 runners are this season.  The STC JV Invite in 2016 was the only other previous time we had 2 4x400 relay teams earn an elite performance in the same 4x4 race as the A squad went (a then MS record) 3:50 and the B squad went 4:11.  This year's double of 3:47 and 4:05 is even more impressive!

 

In the running events, Elex finished in the runner-up spot overall (top non-club runner) in the 400 with a solid 52.3 while Tapiwa finished in 6th place among school scorers with his sub-56, earning 3 points for the team.  Jahmari had a top 20 finish among school scorers, as did Lucas and James P in the 200 and Palmer in the 300 hurdles.

 

In the field events, Elex was the high jump state champion, moving up from his 3rd place finish last year.  He finished just ahead of the same athlete in both this year's and last year's high jump competition.  Although he did not get to his 6-0 PR, he had some good attempts at 5-10 in terrible conditions with a shorter run-up.  His 5-8 marks his 2nd best result ever and tied the meet record.  Elex is listed as 2nd in the results, but he won on misses and was announced as first and received his gold medal, so we are getting that fixed in the results.  The opening height of 5-0 made it tough for Jelus, whose PR is 5-2, but he did have some good attempts in the rain and got better every jump.  Long jump in the heavy rain was a tough go for Jahmari and Palmer and Jelus missed his shot put while Lawson missed his discus, so field events were certainly tough in the rain.  Lawson did have a top-20 finish in the shotput, improving by 3 feet from his throw at the Timberwolf meet in mid-April.  In the discus, Jelus and Sam finished in the top 20 with Jelus almost scoring in 10th place.  He threw over 102 feet while Sam was over 91 feet, both with big PRs from Timberwolf.  Lawson threw around 110 earlier in the week in practice, when it was warm and dry, and that ended up being right around the final scoring distance.

 

Despite the weather, we still did very well from a finish-place standpoint.  We had a good showing in the score and kept it close for the win.  Last year it took 53 points to win to our 44 in second.  I thought we would be close to that number this year and we were with 51 points (it says 49 right now but we will get 2 more points once they adjust Elex to 1st in the high jump).  We beat Elizabeth Davis after losing to them earlier this season.  They had 27 points as their fast 1600/800 athlete had a tough day and barely scored, despite being one of the favorites in those two events.  Skyline came on strong with all 4 of their 400 and 800 runners scoring and then combining to win the 4x400 relay.  Blacksburg also did well thanks to their hurdler and a well-balanced approach to the meet.  Walker Grant was very close to us, something I overlooked as their strength was in the field events.  They had the discus champion who also ended up winning the triple jump, part of their 1-3-4 finish in triple jump.  They had 38 of their 45 points from field events for the 3rd place finish.  I thought our 51 was then good enough to win, but it was Robious emerging victorious with 58 points.  I knew they would be tough in the distance events with 3 boys that have run under 5:00 for 1600 this season.  They did pile on the points in the distance events, scoring 37 points across the 1600, 3200, and 4x800, and also picking up 3 more in the 4x100.  However, I overlooked their hurdler who scored 20 points winning both hurdle events and vaulting them into first place with 58 points.  Robious was 7th last year, Floyd County finished 6th last year and this year as well, but we have shown the most consistent success of any program in the state these past two years, finishing in 2nd place both years.  We have scored a cumulative total of 95 points over the last two years at the state meet, compared to Robius at 88, Floyd at 65.5, and Blacksburg at 60 points.

 

As Coach Dunn and I wrapped things up in the field house and wandered out to our cars to arrive home around 11:00pm, I thought about the meet and kept going back over what we could have done differently to win that meet.  I kept circling back to two questions...could we have done better training in the 2 weeks since the JV Invite? and, should we have made a different line up for the meet?  I think the weather may have changed the performances a bit, but I don't know if that would have changed the finish place as other teams and athletes would also have better weather.  We also get the opportunity to run in high school meets, which pushes our stronger athletes more during the season than other middle school programs.  I think we had a good time trial week two weeks ago and got some good PRs, then kept things light enough this week, especially with the early week heat, to be ready to go on Saturday.  In looking at the results now, I can think of some lineup adjustments that may have given us a better shot to win, but we went into the meet with not only a shot to win, but a shot to beat some meet records in the relays while also earning the win.  Then again, I didn't have the meet results going into the meet, and hindsight is always 20/20, so we did the best we could with the information we had and the restrictions (3 running events max per athlete) that were in place in the meet.  I would ask the boys who competed at the state meet if they feel like they did the best they could, from an attitude toward the weather standpoint, from a warming up/cooling down standpoint, or from a mentally ready to compete against tough competition standpoint.  These 3 topics will likely pop up in future meets, specifically high school states and preps, so that is why I wanted to bring it up.