By Forest Langhorne
Leesburg, VA- On Saturday, March 26, Tuscarora High School participated in its first track and field meet of the 2011 track and field season. The meet took place at Centreville High School in Fairfax, VA. The meet which took place was predominantly a relay race, with teams of runners participating in a single event.
Athletes boarded the bus to head to Centreville HS at roughly 6:45 a.m. at Tuscarora and arrived at the school at roughly seven fifteen. The team then spent the next two hours setting up the team tent at the track, warming up, and staying warm.
The first event, the boys and girls long jump, started well with junior Dionte Fitts coming in second place overall and junior Jevon Newman coming in tenth. This was followed by the shot-put relay, with Zoe Curry placing tenth and Anthony Chhoun placing nineteenth. The hurdle relay went next, with Tuscarora girls placing second overall in the shuttle hurdle relay, and the boys team placing third overall.
Next came the triple jump, with Kayleigh McKenzie placing Tuscarora in the top ten for the girls and junior John Johnson placing fourth overall. After this came the four by eight-hundred relay, with the girls’ team placing third and the guys’ team placing second. The next event was the four by one-hundred relay, with the girls’ team placing ninth overall and the guys’ team placing fifth overall. Freshman Courtney Walker placed second overall in the girls’ freshman mile and first in her heat. No boys were entered in this event. The last event of the day was the four by four-hundred, with the girls placing third and the boys placing sixth overall.
At the end of the meet, Tuscarora placed fifth overall in the girls category and the boys placing seventh overall.
“I feel that for being our first race and the fact that we had some amazing performances by several athletes we did pretty well.” voiced sophomore Logan Fierbach about the outcome of the race. However, because the coaches didn’t enter the team into several events, Tuscarora was not able to advance up the scoreboards like some other teams.
With the end of the first race, the Tuscarora Track and Field team has already started looking forward to the future. With the second race of the season coming up on April 2nd, athletes are starting to prepare for the heart of the season. “ We need to work together and close gaps in our times to do better in future races, and we need to push through [the] pain in practices.” said sophomore Jannen Hermann about the what the team needs to do to improve. In the end though, this race did signal a positive start to the season, with freshman Danny Timbers saying, “we showed we aren’t a joke.”