The Eastern Region Championships proved once again to be the state's strongest track & field region as over 100 MileSplit US elite performances came out of the two day competition held at Todd Stadium, home of next weekend's VHSL Group AAA State Championships.
All photos by Andy Paisley
The Ocean Lakes boys won their first regional title ever behind Justin Hunter and some of his football buddies scoring points in the jumps, sprints, and a victorious 4x100 meter relay to form a well-rounded track team with a traditional strong distance group which had two regional champions with Seth Cunningham in the 800 and Conor Doan in the 3200. Hunter won all three jumping events (6'8 HJ, 23-4.50 LJ, 47-11.50 TJ)and also ran on the first place 4x100 meter relay. The rise of Ocean Lakes pushed defending outdoor state champions Western Branch down to second place despite a 4x800 victory (7:58.92) and great performances in the hurdles from Jeffrey Artis (14.11 finals, 14.07 prelims) in the 110 meter hurdles and Jeffery Lewis (38.56 finals, 38.43 prelims) in the 300 meter hurdles.
With Landstown's top two athletes in sprinter Marlena Wesh and hurdler Taylor Wheaton resting up for the state meet, the Western Branch girls were able to win their third straight regional title with only one individual champion, Erika Morgan in the high jump and a 9:35 4x800 win.
Karimah Shepherd of Grassfield in the girls' jumps and James Taylor of Nansemond River in the boys' sprints were two of the meet's top individual performers. Shepherd claimed regional titles in the long jump and triple jump including a state best mark of 40'10.50" in the triple jump. Taylor, who will be gearing for another four state titles next weekend as he pulled off the feat in indoors, rolled through the finals of the 100 (10.64) and 200 (21.40) meter dashes.
The Bethel girls. state champions in the indoor season, ran a state leading time of 3:48.97 in the 4x400 meter relay, but it was their male counterparts who were the story winning the boys 4x400 from the slowest of three sections in a time of 3:20.76 to improve 5 seconds from their previous season best.
Despite the hot weather on Saturday, there were some fast distance times recorded including a great race between Seth Cunningham of Ocean Lakes (1:55.67) and Brandon Burton of Woodside (1:55.70) in the boys 800 meter run with three hundredths of a second separating the two runners. More Ocean Lakes runners raced well in the heat including girls race winners Stacey Nobles in the 3200 meter run (11:02.70), Anne Reiner in the 1600 meter run (5:05.21), and Natalia Kuhn in the 800 meter run (2:13.22) to make it a clean sweep.
Below are the performances entered for the meet that met the national silver standard.
102 National Elites
