Thank you to everyone for your patience and adaptability this past Saturday as we moved our meet inside, had several boys step up to fill some relay voids from our sick/injured/absent teammates, and especially to the boys for handling themselves so well with basically no coach as the three of Carrier/Cross/Dunn were running the meet.  Especially with the amount of veterans on this team, the coaches had full confidence the boys could handle minimal coach presence and they certainly did that well, despite a bit more warming up and cooling down needing to be added into the routine next time around.  No one missed their event, everyone reported with hip numbers and batons as needed in their events, and we of course had quite a few personal bests, which is always our main goal.

 

This was a long day for everyone and I especially want to thank Coach Cross and Coach Dunn who arrived about 9:00am so the three of us could get the field house ready for the meet.  Along with leading field events and of course starting and clerking, not to mention clean up during and after the meet, leaving around 6:30pm certainly made it a long day.  I also want to than Varsity Coach Ware for running our timing system and being willing to move the meet inside.  Sure the weather cleared up unexpectedly, but it was still cool and windy, which likely would have led to finish camera timing malfunction, slower times due to the wind mainly, and not the most comfortable temperature to spectate.  As Coach Dunn put it in our coaches meeting, we wanted to provide the best possible environment for the athletes to run their best, and the indoor track allowed for that.

 

I had mentioned the personal bests and the coaches were pleased to see that we had at least two personal bests in every event, and even a few more in the relays.  Of those personal bests, we had three elite performances with 1 coming in the first individual running event and 2 more coming in the final individual running event.  As mentioned earlier in the year, elite performances are numbers that Coach Dunn and I have come up with to represent higher quality performances that may not make the record board as a top 3 performance, but are pretty good nonetheless.  Tristan Litzenburg was the first of those elite performances.  After already competing in both long jump and shot put before his 55 dash, and not using a block, Tristan blasted off a 7.58, well under the 7.75 elite performance cut-off time.  His time ranks him 13th all-time for STC middle school track, .06 seconds from the 10th slot.  Tristan also lowered his 200 time, already an elite performance from February time trials, now ranked 31st all-time for STC middle schoolers.  In the 3200, Asa White and Charlie Branch, coming off the 1600 earlier in the meet, both pushed each other to sub-12:00 times, eclipsing that elite performance standard.  Charlie, in his 1st ever 3200, clocked 11:51 to win the race and be well under the 12:00 elite performance standard.  Asa had a huge drop of 18 seconds to hit 11:53.  They both now rank 18th and 21st, respectively, all-time STC middle school in this event, and still have the rest of the season to improve.  Charlie had a 5-second PR in his 1600 earlier in the meet, just 10 seconds from the elite performance time in that event.  Asa earned that elite performance during the indoor season, running 5:19 in February.

 

Looking at other personal bests, Dax Alexander earned a NEPR (new event personal record) in his 55 dash (like Tristan), and dropped almost 2 seconds from his 400 (in both individual and relay 400s).  Although we don't count 4x200 relay splits as personal bests due to the running start that the 2nd/3rd/4th runners receive in that relay, we went a perfect 4 for 4 in 200 personal bests in the individual 200.  Along with Tristan's time, Emmanuel Moore broke 30 for the first time dropping about 2/3 of a second, and Corbett Kessel and Zavier Lanneau both got close to breaking 30 with Zavier running 30.03 in his first ever 200 while Corbett dropped .7 for his previous best 200.  Along with Dax's 400, we had 2 other 400 PRs in places you don't always see them.  Adam Bishara, like Jack Bodt, ended up running all 3 relays due to subbing in for teammates, and despite it being his 3rd relay of the day, Adam dropped about a second off his 400 with his split in the final relay.  Oddly, the other 400 PR came from Bryson Shepard who ran a 4-second personal best in the 400 during his opening lap of the 800 he ran in the 4x800 relay.  Jack shaved a little time off his 800 and Mason Joyce dropped about 3 seconds off his 800, but it was Adam and Bryson who had huge drops in their legs of the 4x800 relay, which is why the B team was leading the field at the halfway point.  Adam ran the most surprising result of the meet for me with his 2:37 800 split to lead off the 4x800 B relay.  This was a 30-second PR!  Bryson followed that up running the 2nd leg of that relay and he dropped 12 seconds off his best 800.  Wow!  Most of the distance PRs have already been mentioned, but there were a few more as Kyan Patel dropped over 2 seconds in his 1600 and Arjun Anand dropped over 8 seconds off his 3200.  Charlie and Nic McDonnell each added a field event PR with Tristan adding two in the field as he did both long jump and shot put.

 

At the end of the day, the personal bests and strong running in some non-personal best times, pushed St. Chris to a big win.  We scored 134 points with Franklin Military Academy the closest at 84 points.  Caroline was 3rd with 44.  Overall, we beat 9 schools to open up our season with a 9-0 record.  More impressive news about this was that we did it without 4.5 of our runners, including three of our four fastest sprinters (one athlete was the .5 by the way as he was not available the whole meet).  And, also interesting was that we only won 2 events on the day (the 3200 and 4x800).  We did have 5 runner-ups and 5 3rd place finishes too.  We had 7 of the top 15 scorers in the meet, including Tristan who was the 2nd highest boy scorer in the meet with 21 points.  Mac was 4th in scoring and Asa was 5th.  Charlie, Brendan Cosby, Liam Dunn, and Langdon Sexton were all in the top 15 scorers as well.