Homewood-Flossmoor Co-Ed ABC Invite, 3.7.15

Post date: Jun 17, 2015 10:19:23 PM

Last year at the state finals in Charleston, a retired coach, whose track knowledge I respect, talked to me about our team. He was seeing the Minooka girls perform for the first time.

“Your team has a lot of depth,” he said. “Have you ever gone to one of those A-B-C meets? They would be great for a team like yours.”

He didn’t know we had been competing outdoors at Conant’s A-B-C meet for several years, but he was right about those meets being good for us. This year, we had our first opportunity to compete in an A-B-C meet indoors, and Homewood-Flossmoor was nice enough to invite us to their new state-of-the-art fieldhouse.

The best teams — the truest teams — have depth. And Minooka’s depth brought home a second-place team finish in a tough eight-team field that included last year’s state champs.

Of the 16 track and field events yesterday, the Minooka girls scored in all 16. Thirty-four different Minooka athletes contributed to the scoring. It was a total team effort.

Of our 167.5 total points scored, no one area was lacking. I’ve always respected distance runners for not getting dizzy running so many laps indoors, but their performance yesterday actually made my head spin. In the five distance events, they racked up a whopping 80 points, averaging 16 points an event.

In what might be the toughest sprint field we face in an invitational this year, the sprinters tallied 51 points in their six events, an average of 8.5 points an event. And in the field events, we scored 36.5 points in five events, averaging 7.3 points an event.

The biggest events for Minooka?

Twenty points each for the distance runners in the 4x800m relay and the 3200m run. Twelve points each for the sprinters in the 4x200m relay and the 200m dash. In field events, we scored 18.5 points in high jump alone.

We can delve deeper into our depth (not sure that’s a real phrase — PPC editors, research that) by breaking down the team by class. Freshmen through seniors all contributed significantly to a balanced team effort.