The Girls and Boys had competitors at Reggie Lewis in Boston yesterday competing for a spot at All States a week from today (February 20th).
The Girls finished with 29 Points - good for a 5th place team finish (and a point out of 4th). Looking like tied for 2nd best finish in Indoor Divisionals ever - only the 2nd place finish in 2003 being better! By far the best in the past seven years. What was awesome was we had six individual medalists and a relay - BY FAR more than anytime in the recent past.
For some context, the top 3 in each event in each Division get an automatic berth into the All State meet on Saturday (February 20th) at Reggie Lewis. The next top 9 competitors in all the Divisions combined will also gain entry into this exclusive meet. So the vast majority of events will have 24 competitors. The exception is in events like the High Jump where ties are difficult to cut the field to exactly 24 competitors. Taking last year as an example, they ended up with 33 competitors due to ties in height.
On the Girls side, the 600 Meters was first to see a Holliston competitor. In it, Emma Sayers was our first runner in the 3rd (of 6) heat. She finished 2nd in her heat and 14th overall, not too shabby considering she was the 27th seed entering the race! By the way her new PR is 1:45.80, and only six underclasswomen posted better times.
Next up in the 5th heat were Eve Bagley and Helen Dolan, who entered with the 9th and 13th seeds. Both easily posted PR's. Helen with a 1:41.91 and improving her finish to 11th, just missing the top ten! Eve saved her best for her last High School indoor meet (in an individual event - more on this later). Coming into the race she was out of medal contention with her seed. After leading the 5th heat for most of the first 500 meters she went to the wire with a Norton girl who just inched ahead of Eve at the tape. But she would slip easily under the 1:42 number which had eluded her until then at 1:41.36 and most importantly a MEDAL finish in 7th place!
In the Boys 600, Ryan Sofoul was the sole entry. After running a great race to PR in about 1:30, he was DQ'd on a technicality which no one noticed during the race.
In the Girls 1000, Alexis Mejia started off in the 1st heat and bested her time from last week at TVL's by a full 7 seconds to finish in 18th at: 3:17.33.
Sydney Snow entered as the 2nd seed behind Milton's Colette O'Leary. At the start both competitors got off to a great start and led the pack for the entire race. O'Leary jumping out for the first two laps. The pace was slower than Sydney wanted, so she pulled ahead for the next two laps with O'Leary right on her shoulder. At about 750 Meters, O'Leary made her move and pulled ahead of Sydney with just over a lap to go. At 100 meters she separated and finished ahead of Sydney by a few seconds. While Sydney was hoping for a better time on the clock, she was happy to have qualified for the All State meet for the third year in a row! Her 2nd place time of 2:59.51 was also her second best time ever, providing 8 points for Holliston.
In the Girls 300 Emma Guccione ended up with a time of 43.69 landing her in 13th place out of 26.
Meanwhile, over at the Shot Put, Kelly Alves medaled in 6th place with a toss of 34'3". She has officially qualified as a "Wild card". She currently only has two other competitors in front of her with only the D1 Divisional tomorrow. So unless they have about 10 girls better her throw (unlikely), she will have qualified. In every other Division so far except D4, she would have been 4th or better. Sometimes you just end up with a tough Division!
The High Jump featuring what we could easily put up against ANY TEAM in the state, our girls were off to a good start by all clearing 4'11 without incident. This may not seem like a big deal but 1/4 of the 24 girls did not clear the initial height of 4'11". (Note - Caroline has been battling vertigo this week and Becca had a temperature of 102 the day before the meet - so needless to say, they are a couple of ninja's getting it done out there!!) Then all of our girls cleared 5'0"! To put this in context, there were only 6 other girls who cleared 5'0". So Holliston's team of Madison Ward, Caroline Ward and Rebecca Stevens was 1/3 of the remaining field. Madison sailed over 5'2" by a couple of inches to secure a 4th place finish (tied), while Caroline and Becca weren't able to clear that height. Caroline and Becca also took the medal stand. Becca tied for 8th and Caroline solely in 6th. WAY TO GO LADIES!
Regarding All States, if my math is right and I think it is, Madison is officially in All States!!
Also, Caroline and Becca also have a shot at getting there, the tiebreakers they do with regard to High Jump would take a degree in Advanced Trigonometry (those of you who know me realize this is not my strength...) so we will have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday when the All State Performance lists are announced!! 16 girls jumped 5'2" or higher which isn't the 24 that they usually take. Another 22 girls including Caroline & Becca, cleared 5' - so we will see how they determine who goes.
Just after the High Jump or maybe during (it's fuzzy after 4 hours of dry air at Reggie...), the boys 4x200 relay consisting of Rick Brown, Yoel Lignabou, Jesse Zhangi and Ryan Sofoul took to the track. They had a seed time of somewhere about 1:32 and a seed around 30th. They were in the 1st heat, but really shouldn't have been because they had this group running for the first time all year. They won their heat by 4 seconds, which may not sound like much, but is about 40 meters! They moved all the way up to 21st. Who knows what they can do with a little more time together and running in a more competitive race..
The last Holliston event for the day was the Girls 4x400 relay. Holliston was in the fast heat with 5 other teams. Emma Guccione (Gooch) started out after the first 200 in 4th place, and some in the crowd thought she may be fading at that point. That was not even close to reality as Emma turned it on and passed everyone between the 200 to 300 meter mark to coast in to Eve with a nice lead. Eve had another strong leg handing Madison about a 10-15 meter lead. In most races, this would seem pretty comfortable. The problem was we had the O'Leary sisters from Milton waiting to take the baton from there. They had already each scored impressive wins in the 600 (Elise O'Leary) and the 1,000 (Colette O'Leary). Madison went out for the first 200 and kept the lead, then Elise O/Milton made her move and turned on the jets to create 10 meter lead for her sister Colette. Sydney closed the gap to about 4 meters at the 300 meter mark, but Colette was saving her best for the last 100 and extended her lead back to 10 meters by the finish. While it would have been great to catch Milton, the fact that the girls came in 2nd and qualified for States was sweet victory! Add to that a new School record and PR of 4:10.17 for the relay team and it was just the icing on the cake!
So it's looking promising that we will have the most girls at the All State meet in a long time (I'm going out on a limb and saying probably EVER - so Coach Moreau/Levausser/Kelley - if you are reading this - let us know what you think! UPDATE - Coach Kelley was reading it and was nice enough to update us by saying that if Becca & Caroline qualify, it will be the most ever for Holliston!). Sydney, Madison, Kelly and the 4x400 team in, and Caroline & Becca still w/a shot at it.
Good luck Saturday February 20th to those competing!
Finally, the Banquet will be at the High School Cafe on February 24th (Wednesday) at 6:00 p.m.
