As I wrap up my 19th year of teaching and coaching at St. Christopher's, I have spent all but my first year (when the track team had 3 people and didn't need 2 coaches!) coaching outdoor track.  I believe that this was likely the coldest track meet I have coached in that almost-two-decade timeframe.  There have been some weekday meets that have gone late and gotten a bit cool, but to start a meet in the 40s with northerly wind and damp conditions was certainly a new one for me.  Luckily the rain mostly held off despite a little bit of mist early in the meet for about 45 minutes.  In fact, we even had some sun for the 4x400 at the end of the meet.  Middle school track athletes are notorious for not warming up properly, so that was certainly something communicated to the boys before the meet.

 

Despite these conditions, 10 of our 24 athletes absent, and needing to be at school on a Saturday before the boys normally have to be on a weekday, we kept our early season momentum going into this meet.  We had 14 personal bests, plus 8 more NEPRs in events that we only do in this meet (33" hurdles, 8.8 lb shot put, 1k discus).  We had 8 elite performances, which included 4 improved elite performances and 1 relay elite performance.  We also had 2 close calls with the record board as we had two boys become the 4th best runner in STC MS history in an event, just out of reach of that third spot on the record board.

 

Alexander Koussoglou had a triple elite performance day in the 100, 200, and 400.  His final event, the 200, was his best as he became the 4th STC MS runner to break 25.00 in that event, now just .08 seconds behind the 3rd best 200 runner and .27 behind the 2nd best 200 runner.  This 200 was preceded by him becoming the 12th STC MS runner to break 58.00 in the 400, now ranking 11th all-time in that event.  Both the 200 and 400 featured some great closing speed to help him earn personal bests (and victories!), showing Alexander's great resilience after some tough races at Collegiate last week.  Charlie Branch was the other near-record board performer on the day.  He almost became just the 4th STC MS runner to break 11:00 in the 3200, running 11:01 and dropping almost 13 seconds off his PR.  He sits less than 5 seconds from the 3rd best time and a spot on the record board.  Later in the day, Charlie had a personal best in the 800, from Wednesday's split in the upper school meet 4x800, dipping below the 2:19 mark and vaulting him into 14th on the all-time list.  He even closed the day out with another personal best, dropping over 2 seconds off his 400 PR, helping that 4x400 team to an elite performance.  Although Charlie did not run the 1600 as he did in the first two meets this season, the 1600 saw some great time drops.  Miko Aboutanos broke 7:00 for the first time, thanks to a fast final lap to help him earn a 15-second PR.  Teddy Sterrett, despite a string of missed days running due to injury, NYC, and sickness, had almost a 20-second drop off his 1600 PR.  Like Charlie, he also dropped almost 2 seconds in the 400 running on the B 4x400 relay team.  Speaking of relays, the 4x800 team had a trio of PRs as Eli Holloway and Aveon Wynn shaved off about a half second each from their 800 PRs (Eli also nabbed another PR in the 4x400 relay).  Sandwiched between Eli and Aveon was Freddy Gatty's almost 10-second PR in the 800.  This trio set up Langdon Sexton to anchor the team to a solid time and runner-up finish.  Other PRs, not counting NEPRs in those rarely thrown weights in shot and disc, came from Ricky Gray in the 200 and Alexander in the shot put by almost 6 feet (since he threw last year at this meet).  A shout out to Palmer Telfian for giving the 110 33" hurdles a shot at this meet.  Much like his high jump, he picked up a few 7th place points for us in the hurdles.

 

Speaking of points, we had a pretty good day on the track.  We moved up from finishing 5th last year to 4th this year.  Although we finished 8th in field event scoring, we ended up tied for 2nd in scoring in the running events.  All of our medals (top 3) came from running events.  Alexander had a double-gold in the 200/400, Langdon had 2 silver (4x8 and 800) and a bronze (4x4), while Charlie had a triple bronze day to go with his triple PR day (3200, 800, 4x4).  Eli also had multiple medals with a silver from the 4x8 and a bronze from the 4x4.  Tapiwa Mutoti just missed an individual medal in the 400, finishing in 4th place, but did grab a bronze in the 4x4.  Freddy and Aveon were the other 2 with medals as they were part of the runner-up 4x8 team.  Scoring went down to 8th place, so along with Tapiwa's 4th and Palmer's two 7ths, Alexander's 5th place 100 finish was the only other scorer for us.  Out of curiosity, I went ahead and re-scored the meet using the lineup I would have used if we had our full team roster (and those absent athletes earned at least their PR in the events I would enter them in).  As you will see in the attachment, we would have won the meet by almost 30 points.  I did not do this to make the absent folks feel bad, but to show the potential of this team and how far a little more depth would have gone at this meet.