Small-School Boys
Make no mistake about it, small-school boys were heard from in a big way in the distance events.
Highlights don't always begin with the 800 meters (an event run in the heat of the afternoon) for this meet, but they did this time around. Alamosa's Chad Jackson chased Air Academy's Cal Banta twice around the Dutch Clark oval. Jackson couldn't hold off Banta at the end, but he did post a 3A-leading 1:58.09.
Not long after, Manitou Springs' Jayden Omi took the 400 with the only sub-50 of the day, posting a 49.98. Omi faced longer odds in the loaded 100 and 200 fields, yet still came away with a fifth in both events.
All that helped set the stage for the feature events of the meet--the 1600 and 3200.
In the top heat of the boys 1600, Brock Helvey of Douglas County was good enough to set the early pace and keep the racing honest. On lap three, however, Rampart's Sadio Fenner took over and seemed poised to put the race away in a decisive kind of way. "Decisive," however, vanished from everyone's vocabulary when Lamar's Blake Davis made a massive charge on the final lap.
Coming off the final turn, it seemed for a moment that Davis might reel in the Rampart senior. That didn't quite happen, but Davis did run through the finish line with a 3A-leading 4:23.40 and new Lamar school record.
The fireworks, however, were far from over.
The final event of the evening, the boys 3200 top heat, started off in unassuming fashion. As sometimes happens in a race like this, nobody seemed especially enamored with leading a pack of wolves around the track for a couple laps before getting gobbled up by said wolves starting about lap three.
Consequently, the first lap wasn't all that fast.
TCA's Mason Norman eventually stepped up and led through the mile, before Connor McCabe of Rampart took over and drove the pace car through the difficult 5th and 6th laps.
About then, however, TCA's Ryan Moen went to high gear, yanked the lead from McCabe's hands and was never heard from again.
Moen crushed the last two laps, taking the win in 9:21.50 and opening up a gap of a little over six seconds on McCabe.
Other small-school highlights on the afternoon and evening included a 3A chart topping time of 3:25.52 for the Alamosa 4x400 squad, a 42-4 for Lamar's Dylan Vallejos in the triple jump, and a 47-7.5 for Lamar's Brock Murphy in the shot put.