We have completed our first official competition for the year and there is a lot to be excited about in the results! Unlike many other sports, Track & Field is amazing because there are so many ways to look for progress and accolades and they are all verifiable through numbers-based proof. We're going to break it all down for you here, but know that the coaches are proud of the work you've done to this point.

 

For middle school Indoor Track & Field, we often don't look to be competitive in the team points totals since two-thirds of our meets are competitions involving JV and Varsity athletes (though funnily enough we do still sometimes pick off a few Upper School teams). There are two meets a year that we care about the team score as a metric, and those are our two middle school meets. On Friday, we scored right in the middle of the pack (4th place), with Collegiate taking the win for the third MS Indoor meet in a row. Our competition has gotten stronger over the past few years, with some legitimate programs joining us and some of our long-standing competition has been improving dramatically. Remember, though, that we did this with only 11 athletes, 8 of whom are 7th graders, and skipped two events entirely due to our low numbers. Compare our 25 entries to the 83 entries from the Cougs and 70 from our friends from FMA and you'll see the importance of having a team size that can cover multiple events. With all of the success you 7s are having, talk to your classmates about joining you for next year! The more friends you have on the team, the more fun you'll have and the easier it will be to be competitive.

Here is a link to the full results from the meet, including team scores at the bottom of the page.

 

Here is a numbers based recap of our results. You'll notice that there is a lot of data for the first half of the meet thanks to our very own (currently Swimming) Coach Carrier volunteering his time to come in and get splits on folks until he had to duck out to his dadly duties. MANY THANKS to him for helping get so much data to support us while Coach Cross and Coach Dunn were running the meet!

 

What follows here is a narrative recap of the results, highlighting improvement and achievements from the athletes. Again, Track & Field has MANY ways to be successful. You could be in last place in a race and have your time still be praise-worthy due to it being a personal record (PR), a season record for our returning veterans, a milestone for you as an athlete in trying some new event for the first time (a New Event Personal Record (NEPR), which Coach Dunn pronounces "neeper"), or maybe you picked up points for the team. 

Maybe you did amazingly and hit "Elite Performance Status." Over the years, the coaching staff has been able to identify special "Elite" times and marks that are difficult to achieve by most athletes in each event and are targets for some of our advanced athletes to shoot for. Finally, Historical MS records are the most difficult to achieve, with the top three names of all time going on a record board on the wall in the Middle School.

 

Our day began with the field events and we started with a bang! Corbett has had his eye on Elite status in the Long Jump since last indoor season. His confidence in his favorite event paid off today on the very first jump with an Elite-level 16' 4.5" pop off of the board. Impressively, all three of his marked distances at the meet were over 16 feet, proving pretty definitively that his jump was not a one time event! Corbett is currently the 17th best StC jumper historically and is now only 12 inches away from top-ten all-time. CONGRATULATIONS! The rest of our long jumpers didn't disappoint, rounding out a perfect 5 for 5 of personal records. Langdon launched to a 14" personal best from the mark he set last in last spring's outdoor season. Freddy was only a few inches behind him as our top 7th grader. Freddy improved his personal record by 14 inches as well, besting his previous record from practice right before Thanksgiving Break. Eli set a new personal best by over a foot from what he had accomplished in 6th Grade PE last winter. McCoy was the big winner on the day in terms of distance improved, absolutely crushing his previous best from a meet last winter by 23.5 inches and earning him his first marks in the double digits! This was our best scoring event of the day as well, with Corbett and Langy combining for 11 team points.

 

Ivan was our only competing thrower for the meet, but WOW what a debut! His first four judged throws were all over 20 feet (a rarity) and got further each attempt (that pretty much never happens)! His neeper of 22' 1" is impressively less than three feet away from Elite status in this event! Ivan's 5th place in this event earned 4 points for the team.

 

Our pair of High Jumpers had an uphill battle at our opening meet. Though they'd both jumped before, it had been a year since having consistent training due to the difficulty of getting practice time on court 4 where long jump occurs. An ambitious opening height unfortunately right around the same time as the 4x800 proved a bit much for Davis, but practice is practice. Palmer effectively tied his best jump from last year and so is starting right where he left off in trying to conquer 3' 10." We'll get more consistent work on this event in the coming weeks.

 

Our first running event and relay attempt of the year scored the team a quick 8 points. Davis led us off in the 4x800m Relay with what was technically a NEPR, the first time he has competed at this distance. Impressively, he starts only 1.52 seconds away from Elite status at this distance with our fastest time on the day at 2:21.52. Langdon got the baton in first place and held that lead throughout his leg, passing the stick to Eli. Competition brings out the best in a lot of us, as Eli showed by breaking not just one, but two of his personal records in a single run! Eli's opening 400 meters was actually his best 400 ever by 0.85 seconds, improving on what he ran in Time Trials at the beginning of the season! He then continued running the final portion of his leg of the race to set a NEPR for this distance. McCoy, fresh off his big long jump improvement, also decided to go big with the double PR here, shaving 0.05 off of his best 400 ever while knocking 15 seconds off of his personal best in the 800 which he set during Time Trials LAST year. All of the boys even have room to grow in this event by running it a little more evenly (our first 400s were a little quick making the tail end a tough test of fortitude), so I'm excited to see what we can do later with more experience under our belts!

 

The 55m Dash was another event that went pretty well for us. Without a way to accurately get these times in practice, we were guaranteed four neepers here as we had no times on our 7th grade competitors. Corbett made sure to make it a clean sweep of PRs by lowering his best time from last December by 0.65 (which is actually a lot of improvement in a race this short). This fourth place finish boosted Corbett to our top individual scorer for the day off of his two events. Ivan was right behind him with a VERY impressive 7th grade time of 8.17. This neeper was enough to crown him (as of the writing of this recap) as the top 7th grader in the state on MileStat in middle school competition. Palmer and Freddy scored effectively the same time on their neepers, with Palmer edging out his teammate by an amount measured in the thousandths of a second. Chase also earned a NEPR in this event, rounding out a set of 5 times all below 8.75 seconds, which is pretty solid! Your end-of-race "decelerations" into the mat were brilliant and worth style points in my books as well.

 

The 1600m Run was another 2-for-2 personal record event for us with both Teddy and Ely completely destroying their old times by 41 seconds each and passing milestones on the way. Ely has been making an assault on his mile time since Cross Country this past fall and began the Indoor season with a big PR to set him up for his first sub-8:00 time. Well, he did that and almost hit the 7:30 mark while he was at it! Teddy has been chasing his mile time since last year and just couldn't quite match his one crazy 1600 from sixth grade. Not only did he beat that old time, he busted through the 7:00 barrier for the first time as well! But wait... there's more! Both guys also beat their 1000m times from the Bruner Scrimmage during the first 5 laps of their 1600! Double PR! That's how much work they've been putting in! Wait, what? A TRIPLE PR?!? I don't think we've ever had THAT before, but ELY just did it - he improved his 800m PR from his opening 4 laps in the Bruner meet 1000m by eleven seconds! Well done gents!

 

Our next event was the 500m Dash, which is one of the most physically taxing events on the track. Neither of our competitors had an official time in this event, so both are noteworthy as neepers. Chase made it across the line solidly in under the 1:45 mark. Palmer's 1:36.24 was the first 7th grade time across the line and so has for the moment earned him the top spot for this event on MileStat in Virginia for the class of 2030 (MS or HS meets)! And this is a prime example of what the coaches mean when we say there's many ways to win. Palmer was ELEVENTH in the 500m Dash at our meet and still got a NEPR and is currently #1 in the state. ALWAYS give your best, you never know who else you're against or what might come out of it! THINK BIG!

 

Langdon earned us eight points for his second place finish in the 1000m Run, while Eli competed in the "a thousand" for the first time, breaking the 4:00 barrier in the process and was just barely out of a scoring position.

 

Freddy came out of the gates swinging when it was time for the 300m. His neeper was good enough for a 7th place finish in the meet and excitingly was south of the 50 second mark in this debut. Ivan was right behind him, also breaking 50 for the first time while improving his personal best from the Bruner Meet by two seconds. These guys combined for 3 more team points. Teddy also earned himself a neeper in this event, breaking the 60 second mark on his first attempt.

 

Our final competed event of the day was the 3200m Run, and it served as a satisfying bookend to the Elite performance that began our day. With his successful completion of the 'two-mile' in 11:48.07, Davis became the 21st fastest StC middle schooler at this distance all-time (less than a second behind our own Coach Cross's son, Philip, from back in 2010) and earned him his second individual Elite Performance (he already has Elite status in the 1600m from his efforts in a XC Time Trial in the fall)! This is quite the feat, as it means A) running two back-to-back miles in less than 6:00 each and B) it is not a distance many middle schoolers are mentally prepared to tackle for all SIXTEEN laps of the indoor track (currently only 2 of the 26 elite performers in this event have their best time from indoors since outdoor is considered easier for many reasons, one of which being only needing to count to eight laps). CONGRATULATIONS DAVIS! You are 2/5 of the way to being on the Elite Performers list (a group of studs who have Elite level performances in five or more events) and were our top seventh grade points scorer at the meet! Running with Davis in this big race at the end of a meet that was running long (sorry!!) were our Cross Country stalwarts, McCoy and Ely, who each earned solid NEPRs in this event and who join a pretty short list of middle schoolers tough enough to even attempt this race.

 

BONUS RESULTS: Our JV and Varsity teams competed on Saturday in their first meet of the year (they won! YAY!), and they invited Ivan to go and compete with them as a Pole Vaulter. He took 6th place in the meet with his 6' 6" vault and starts the season ranked first in Virginia on MileStat for the class of 2030. Nice!

 

Overall, we have a lot to be proud of from our first meet this year. Everyone on the team earned at least one PR or NEPR, many of you several. We'll keep building on our strength and stamina all season. We will also work to fine-tune skills in field events and get time in the blocks to make our sprint starts more explosive. I'm excited for what the future holds for us. We look to get back to competition on Friday with our second meet of the year (this time competing alongside our JV and Varsity elders).