On May 18, Stag Country raised another banner for track & field. The Stags, led by prestigious head coach Buddy Crutchfield and his crew, lifted DeMatha once again to the title. The young faith-filled gentlemen and scholars beat the competition with speed, skill, and brotherhood.
One of the stars of the championship meet was Myles Dixon. Myles is an rising junior on Madison Street and is already looking forward to a repeat. The young runner excels in the 400, 800, and 300-meter hurdles. He was happy to get the championship and the win but felt he could’ve done even better. He says, “We did great, we are great because we played together and pushed each other hard, and that is why we won.” There is no other way to describe the brotherhood.
Another amazing and successful runner is Daden Grogan. A rising senior, Daden is looking forward to one last year competing with the Stags. He is one of our longer-distance runners, specializing in the 800, 1600, and 4×8. Just like Myles, Daden points out that one of the reasons that the team was successful was the fact that the chemistry was great and they had each other’s backs no matter what. “We had all the confidence and trust in each other, and all the hard work paid off.”
Sophomore Joshua Virgil is the definition of a team player. He talks about how he wanted to compete and how he wanted to provide everything he has for the team. He talks about how he ran a race that he does not do often but did what he had to in order to push his teammates and team across the board. He talked about doing well in the 200, 100, and long jump. “I was focusing on getting feet down and working on my twitch muscles due to the fact that I am not really a 100 runner. I had my teammate in my race though and I pushed him enough for him to qualify and place in the finals which is good for me and my team.”
The top performers of the meet were seniors Caleb Barley and Chase Lopez. Barley won both the discus (148-05) and shot put (57-00) to take home male field athlete of the meet while Lopez pulled off an impressive three-race performance to capture the male track athlete of the meet.
Lopez capped off his weekend with a half-second victory over McNamara rival Nathaniel Spears, winning the event with a time of 1:54.51. This was an impressive performance considering he had placed a very close second the night before in the 3200m run with a time of 9:20.92, just .04 seconds behind the winner, and earlier Saturday afternoon broke the meet and DeMatha records for the 1600m run, winning the race with a time of 4:14.13.
The previous 1600m record at DeMatha was 4:19.40 seconds, set by Stagline advisor Mr. Cory Puffett.
How could you not like this time!? All for winning and brotherhood.
