Despite quite a few absences at our Collegiate meet last week and also this coming Saturday down in Midlothian, we were able to get in a few events yesterday at the upper school home meet.  And despite only having 10 opportunities for a measurable time, distance, or height, the 10 boys in competition earned 6 elite performances with 5 of the 8 individual performances yielding a personal best.

 

The 4x800 relay got the PR train started.  Although we did need a last minute substitution, literally minutes before the race, it was a great race across the board.  Langdon Sexton got it started with a blistering 2:15, slightly faster than his previous best when he anchored the 4x8 in the first meet.  He was just .03 off of moving up from 8th to 7th all the all-time list.  Charlie Branch took the baton second and went out aggressively, hanging on during the second lap to just get under the 2:20 elite performance number (2:19.67).  Charlie is now 20th all-time on arguably the hardest running elite performance to obtain (9 of the 24 on the list are 2:19.something).  Corbett Kessel had a solid 3rd leg, just missing his best time by a few seconds.  Aveon Wynn ended up filling in for the team at the last second and despite doing the almost 4-mile run in practice an hour earlier, made a quick change back to his shorts, did minimal warm-up, and then went out and ran a 17-second PR from 3:06 down to 2:49!  His big drop helped the team break the 10:00 barrier, which is the elite performance number for the 4x800 relay.  The team's 9:57 ranks them 16th on the STC MS all-time list.  A special thank you to Freddy Gatty who was about to run it, and of course to Aveon who was excited to jump in there to save the relay.  Not to take anything away from this team's accomplishment, but it is worth noting that our top 4 800 runners on the roster would have likely run under 9:30, which would have put us top in the state this year for middle school 4x8s and also put us 4th on the STC MS all-time list.  We will hopefully get another crack at that event with our top 4 later in the year.

 

The other relay that took to the track yesterday was the 4x100 relay team.  The team of birthday boy Tapiwa Mutoti, Alexander Koussoglou, Emmanuel Moore, and Elex Churchwell ran a blazing time, becoming just the 4th quartet to ever break 49.00 in this event for STC MS.  Their handoffs looked good, especially for just practicing them a few hours earlier with Coach Dunn.  They ran 48.84 which was the 4th fastest time in STC MS history.  However, the record-setting team from last year has the 1st and 3rd best times, so this year's squad made the record board in my room as they are the 3rd fastest team in the event.  One other note about this race that I think is more impressive, from a programmatic standpoint, is that the 2022 squad broke the STC MS record, then 4 different people broke it in 2023, then 4 different people broke that record in 2024, and now 4 other people in 2025 have a good chance to break the record again.  We will likely have a few more cracks at this record (with the same team) on April 30th at the STC upper school meet and also the JV Invite on May 9th as they look to shave off .58 seconds to eclipse the record of 48.27.  I do think the cooler temperatures yesterday being replaced by warmer temperatures next time may also help, as it typically does with sprints and field events.

 

In the field events, our high jumpers were close to their PRs as Elex went over the 5-0 elite performance mark again.  Jayden Addei cleared 4-8, just off his 4-10 from last week.  Lawson Clelland had a double-PR day in the throws as he improved by over a foot and a half in shot put, now just over a foot from the elite performance mark of 25-feet.  In the discus, Lawson had a big PR of 16-feet!  More importantly, his throw of 70-4 put him over the 70-foot elite performance number for discus, putting him 10th on the STC MS all-time list.  I am sure he now has his eyes on 71-4, 72-7, and 73-1, the next three on this all-time list, and eventually 80-9 to pass his brother!