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WOOD RIVER – For East Alton-Wood River's boys track team, it was old hat.
For the girls track team, it was a breakthrough.
The Oilers won their fifth straight Prairie State Conference boys track championship at the league meet Monday evening at EAWR's Memorial Stadium with 142 points, with Marquette Catholic taking second with 71 points, league newcomer McGivney Catholic a surprising third with 69 points, Metro East Lutheran with 37 points and Bunker Hill with 30 points.
For the girls, the Oilers, after two straight second-place finishes, finally won the PSC title with a big performance, scoring 139 points to top the Explorers, who had 80 points, followed by the Minutemaids with 38, Knights with 32 and Griffins with 13 in their first PSC girls meet; the Griffins officially will join the PSC next year, but were invited to take part in this year's meet by league coaches.
“We've been wanting this for a long time,” said Oiler coach Russ Colona. “The girls have been second the last two years – the boys have won it for five years in a row – but we've been wanting the double-sweep, boys and girls – it makes it nice.
“The girls are young – we've got one senior and we were led by two freshman stars and a sophomore star.”
The freshmen, Jayden Ullrich and Hannah Sechrest, had big days for the Oiler girls – Ullrich won the shot put, discus throw, 100 meters and 200 meters while Sechrest won the high jump and long jump and took third in the 200 meters while running on two relay teams; the sophomore, Leighann Nottke, won both the 100 and 300 hurdles.
“It was a great day,” Colona said. “Those are great kids. It was a team effort; I had girls running in the (1600 meters) and (3200 meters) who hadn't run all season, so they did really well.”
The key to the titles was, put simply – hard work. “We put in a lot of work. “We started in mid-January and I run these kids,” Colona said. “It's just the old-fashioned way – a lot of hard work; I push on them and push on them and they respond – it's old-school. I'm proud of these kids.”
The Griffins' surprise third place in the boys competition mean much to McGivney coach Jim Helton. “I thought our kids competed very hard,” Helton said. “We had a few champions and some second places and a lot of PRs (personal records) today.”
While McGivney won't officially be in the PSC until next school year, the league's coaches invited them to take part in this year's meet. “The track coaches got together and decided to let us in this year,” Helton said. “It's been awesome for us. They've been working really hard and it's just nice to see the fruit of our labor.
“We only have, I think, 11 boys and three girls, three juniors, no seniors and the rest are freshmen and sophomores; it's our first year as a varsity (track) team but we run it as a varsity program. We decided that we wanted to do that rather than start as a JV program because we've got some kids we think that could potentially do well this season; we had a lot of cross-country guys and girls and we wanted to continue training in the spring.
“We started with no field events; we decided to start with running and see how we do; they're working hard. Next year, we'll hopefully layer in some field events. They're some a good bunch of men and women.”
EAWR's T.J. Lawson finished second in the 100 meters behind Marquette's Aaron Gregory and won the 200 meters on the day while running on both the sprint relay teams, finishing second in the 4x100 and winning the 4x200; Tavion Walker took the high jump for EAWR and finished fourth in the 110 hurdles.
Other highlights on the day included a triple win for Marquette's Riley Vickrey in the 800, 1600 and 3200 meters while Bunker Hill's Robbi and Ava Ostendorf took 1-2 in the 400 meters for the Minutemaids.
