Faythe Harris was half of a Wiggins sweep of the 400 titles at the Yuma Bill Kalb Invitational. Colorado Track XC file photo by Alan Versaw.
There were two rankings meets taking place on Tuesday. Neither was a blockbuster meet in terms of size, but there are a few things about these meets you'd probably like to know.
Jeffco Qualifier #2
A lot of sprint and hurdle times were lost to wind, so we won't take the time to recount those here except to say that 15.00, even with a +2.5 wind, for the 110 hurdles is pretty fast. Slap a sticky note on the name of Michael Dalton out of Bear Creek.
Bear Creek's 43.98 4x400 gets a little mention as well. That's by no means a chart-topping time, but it is the kind of time that could suggest bigger things down the road.
Lakewood's Braden Smith and D'Evelyn's Sage Wheelan both improved slightly on horizontal jumps seeds, but Smith's 22-3 at Mountain Range on Saturday stands as his best mark of the season.
Cammy Sargent tore up the 400 field with a sub-59 on a windy day. No PR, but a nice effort nevertheless. Makenzie Patarino, a case study in consistency, once again topped out the pole vault at 11-0.
I was going to note that Alexis LaLiberte of Green Mountain added a half-inch to her discus PR, except that half inches don't count in discus. So, she added the virtue of reproducibility to her PR discus mark.
Yuma Bill Kalb Invitational
If you've been around Colorado high school track and field for a while, you know that adding "Yuma" to the front of this meet name is redundant. But, not everyone has been around that long. So, the longer name sticks.
Interestingly, there may have been less wind in Yuma than Lakewood. How's that for a man-bites-dog kind of story?
I'm honestly not sure I have much recollection of Ridge View Academy running track and field before, but Carlos Sanders of RVA was very much out in front of the 100 and 200 fields, and with nice times, as well.
Shane Finnegan, as has been his habit most of the season, dominated the 400, this time with a 51.10. Jorden Jole of Merino won the 800 and 1600, getting the best of Erick Enriquez-Acosta both times. Enriquez-Acosta's times, however, were more than enough to paste him squarely in the middle of the 1A radar screen for both events. Logan Redabaugh's 19-6.5 long jump accomplishes much the same at the 2A level. Brandon Hinkle got his outdoor pole vault untracked in a serious way with a 13-10 at his home meet. And, just when you thought Jordan Thompson might be the lone throws dude at Sedgwick County, up arises Chad Mikelson with a 44-3.5 heave.
There's a little synergy in the rings at SeCo.
And that would bring us to the girls. Faythe Harris gave Wiggins a sweep of the 400s. Taylor Godsey's 800 was six seconds faster than at the same meet last year, a fact which might give some pause to a few 2A folks. Sister (?) Megan went a very nice 35-1 in the triple jump, wind legal. In a match-up of northeastern Colorado titans of distance, Courtney Jenson of Wiggins upended Bailey Walser of Merino, 12:06 to 12:18. Wray's Alyssa Valko clipped off a nice 48.99 300H. And, Burlington got a very nice 1-2 in the discus from Ellie Berry and Miryah Jones.
All in all, this one ends up as one of the best small school meets of the season. You don't very often get as many rankings marks out of a meet as this one produced.