Saturday certainly lived up to its billing as a high quality meet and great competition to push our team.  It was a nice weather day and although it was long, that length gave athletes a good amount of rest between events.  We continue to focus on the boys earning personal bests and this meet certainly created a great atmosphere for that goal, especially because there were no entry restrictions in individual events.  This allowed us to put 15 runners each in the 100 and 200, something we would not get a chance to do at any other meet.  These 2 events provided 20 of our 35 personal bests on the track, with 12/15 earning a personal best in the 200, arguably our most impressive event on the day for PRs.  We had 38 personal bests in total, with only 3 in the field events (mainly due to the different weights being used in shot and discus limiting our ability to PR).  There were also 15 elite performances, 3 improved school records, and 4 meet records earned by the Saints.

 

Elex certainly had an historic day.  He was one of many boys to have 4 events on the day with Lucas and Jelus each doing 5 events.  Elex went into the day with the potential to win all 4 of his events and set meet records in all 4 of them as well.  Not only did he achieve those goals, the way he did it was impressive because it included 3 personal bests.  He was pushed quite a bit in the 100 and the 200, pulling away at the end of these races and on his way to lowering his school records.  He also pulled away from his competition in the 400, running his 2nd best time ever.  He was in a good battle in the high jump and after winning at 5-6, his 3rd time achieving that school record height, he decided to go one more height, 5-7.  He missed attempt 1, made an adjustment, missed attempt 2 but got closer, and then made yet another adjustment to sail over 5-7 on his final attempt.  Seeing Elex make adjustments as needed at such a high height was impressive and sets him up well to go after 5-8 and higher in future high jump competitions.

 

Speaking of busy days, Tapiwa was the only STC athlete with 4 running events on the day.  After equaling his 100 PR and scoring a point for the team, Tapiwa had the tough task of leading off the 4x100 relay (to a 3rd place finish) and running in the 400 in the "next" event.  He was on a mission in that 400, dropping over 2 seconds from his best time and moving into 5th on the STC MS all-time list.  He was just a quarter of a second from giving us a 1-2 finish in the event.  Tapiwa also led off the 4x400 relay with an elite performance and helped that team to the 7th best 4x400 time in STC MS history.  It secured Tapiwa's 3rd medal of the day and the Saints are now ranked 3rd in the state among middle school 4x400 teams.

 

Jahmari, Aidan, and Eli helped shore up our middle distance strength at the meet.  All 3 were on the runner-up 4x800 and runner-up 4x400 relays with Jahmari (400) and Aidan (800) each grabbing individual 5th place points to go with it.  Jahmari did pull off an 8th place finish in his long jump to round out his day.  Aidan and Jahmari were both within a second of breaking the 2:20 elite performance time in the 800.  This helped spur the 4x800 team to the 10th best time in STC MS history (oddly our 4th time running 9:44.something) and currently the 3rd fastest middle school 4x800 relay time in the state.  We also just missed the old meet record by .8 seconds (held by STC's 2023 relay team and beaten by Tomahawk Creek this year).  We did beat the old meet record in the 4x400 relay (also held by STC's 2023 relay team but beaten this year by Elizabeth Davis).  We had 6 PRs in the 400, including Aidan's first time under 59 (in the 4x400 relay) and Eli getting closer to breaking 1:00 with his 1:00.17 PR in the 4x400 relay.  Reid and Ford also each dropped over a second in the individual 400.  The individual 800 only yielded one PR, but the 4x800 near the beginning of the meet was most impressive.  Along with Jahmari and Aidan's nearly elite performance PRs in the 800, DJ had a 3-second personal best on the A team.  The B team was on fire though.  Freddy dropped 6.6 seconds and almost broke 2:30, Palmer dropped 13 seconds to break 2:40 and Reid dropped 17.7 seconds to break 2:40.  This cumulative drop of 37 seconds among these 3 runners sure made for a much faster 4x800 time than the seed time I had given them.

 

In the distance events, we only had 3 runners in action.  Hudson was our lone ranger in the 1600, dropping 12 seconds from Collegiate just 3 days earlier.  LB and Miko took on the 3200 and ran an impressive race.  After a 12:57 (LB) and 13:00 (Miko) in the first meet, these boys worked together to run 12:48 pace for most of the race.  With two laps to go, they ended up in the mix with the main pack and had enough left to start picking off runners en route to big PRs - 32 seconds for LB and 27 for Miko.  These big drops even put them into scoring position in 6th and 7th, something they were not seeded to do before the meet.

 

I already mentioned the sprint personal best numbers, but I wanted to mention a couple of individuals.  Henry had almost a 3.4 second drop in his 200.  That is an astonishing number for a 200, so well done.  Lucas may have only dropped a tenth in his 100, but it moved him up into a tie for 4th best on the STC MS all-time list, just .11 seconds from getting on the record board in 3rd place.  And, although 20th all-time in the 200 may not sound impressive, if you watched him run the 200, it was impressive.  Lucas was seeded 9th and was the 1st guy to not make it into the fastest heat.  We knew we were in a tight scoring battle with Elizabeth Davis so I told Lucas he needed to not only try and win his heat, but run hard through the line to maybe beat a few people in the fast heat.  Coming off the first curve, I was worried as Lucas seemed to be running behind at least half the field, but then he found some extra gear and rode that all the way through the finish line.  He won his heat, dropped 2/3 of a second (which is pretty substantial given that he already runs low 26s), and beat all but 3 people in the fast heat.  Unfortunately two "no seed time" runners beat Lucas from later heats, but he still ended up in 5th, 4 slots above his 9th place seed.

 

In the field events, we did okay.  I already mentioned Elex in the high jump.  Jelus tied his 5-0 PR which is the elite performance height.  Jelus was the only athlete in the meet to score in 3 field events.  Had we tried out triple jump before the meet, I have a hunch it might have been 4 field event scores for Jelus.  Lawson had another good day for us in the throws as he did back at our first meet in March.  He became just the second STC MS athlete to throw over 100 feet with the smaller disc (101-00) to join (current senior) Ryan Smith (104-9) as the only duo to earn that distance.  Similarly, Lawson (33-1) and Jelus (32-11) joined Lawson's brother Lance (35-5.5) as the only trio over 30-feet with the smaller shot.

 

Along with the usual goal of personal bests, we went into this meet with more of a scoring approach.  Through my research of the teams attending, I knew Elizabeth Davis would be tough and will likely be tough again at the state meet, so this was a good dress rehearsal for states.  With that approach, putting our stronger athletes into 4 or 5 events is a lot, but I was trying to find the right mix that would allow us to do the best we could with scoring, even with 7 athletes absent for the meet.  The athletes in 4-5 events on Saturday did a great job managing themselves and I think we made the best possible lineup we could with the 29 who were in attendance at the meet.  Elizabeth Davis had 4.5 more points than us in field and we were also neck and neck in the running events with them outscoring us 81-80.  The meet score was back and forth all day, which certainly made it a more meaningful meet for us after 2 huge wins in our first two middle school meets.  In fact, right after the meet, we were actually under the assumption that we won the meet 121.5 to Elizabeth Davis' 115.  However, later in the evening, the score was posted as 118 to 112.5 with us moving down into 2nd place.  In looking through the results more closely, our B relays, which were being scored on the live results earlier in the day, were now pulled out from scoring.  Given that each team was allowed to enter 2 teams in each relay, and there was no mention of only scoring one relay team in the meet, we were unaware of this "A" relay only scoring procedure.  Our B teams in the 4x8 and 4x4 ran very well, 4th place for each team, so we are currently getting clarification from the meet director about if our 4th place points in each of those races will be honored.  Win or loss aside, we definitely beat 10 teams to move to 31-1 (maybe 32-0).  And, although the field vs. running points may not seem equal, it was a very balanced approach in scoring for us on Saturday.  With the exception of triple jump and hurdles, which we had no entries, and the 1600, which Hudson had a nice 12-second drop from Wednesday, we were able to score at least one point in every other event - 3200, 800, 400, 200, 100, 4x1, 4x4, 4x8, LJ, HJ, DT, SP.  Seeing that just 3 boys scored 65 of the winning team's 118 points or that they scored 20% of their points in one event (the 800), I am very proud of our well-balanced approach.  Sure, Elex was the top scorer in the meet with 40 points, but we had 72.5 more points than that, so it really was a team effort to hang in there with the top team.