Wawasee Defeats Wind, Wood [VIDEO]
NAPPANEE – It’s a phrase the Wawasee girls track program hasn’t exclaimed in eight years. “Win streak!”
Despite the 35-mile-per-hour crosswinds across Andrews Field and periodic spurts of heavy, piercing rain, the Wawasee girls track team defeated NorthWood, 83-49, Tuesday evening to pick up its second win of the season. While it’s modest, for a program that hadn’t won a Northern Lakes Conference track meet since 2006, Lady Warrior head coach Scott Lancaster will take the building block.
“We have a lot of young kids who have been feeling their way through the season,” Lancaster said, whose club moves to 2-3 on the NLC season. “For the first time, they can self-diagnose some of the problems they had early on. The best part is they are learning, and now they are getting competitive. We’re hoping to keep the core kids together and let them build.”
Wawasee and NorthWood split the events at eight wins apiece, but Wawasee did its damage in taking seconds and thirds along with big showings in distance and throws.
The distance corps for Wawasee showed well against NorthWood’s compliment, where the 800 had Delaine Bame (2:43.43), Bridgette Yoder and Madison Miller claim the top three, while Courtney Linnemeier led a sweep of the two-mile, winning at 12:55.21 with Elizabeth Zorn and Bailey Schroeder completing the sweep. Linnemeier (5:53.22) had no trouble winning the one-mile with Zorn taking second.
Wawasee throws were dominant in sweeping both shot and discus, with all five of Wawasee’s shot putters besting NorthWood’s group. Leading the shot put was Katlyn Kennedy (34’10”) with Savannah Schwartz and Madison Beaman two and three. Alexis Manges (101’08”) led the discus, with Hannah Winters and Savannah Schwartz close behind.
“We had some kids really step up for us, and seeing the distance runners and the throwers perform like that in weather like we had today, I’ll take it,” Lancaster said.
Wawasee also had a win from its 4×100 relay team of Leigh-Ann Shrack, Skylar Janda, Sarah Lancaster and Catherine Yankosky (54.69) and the 4×800 relay team ran opposed at 13:59.72. On that distance relay were Molly Swartz, Abby Mejia, Schroeder and Miller. Shelby Swartz added a win in the 100 hurdles at 19.08, edging NorthWood’s Reagan Smith by a step.
Highlighting NorthWood, Smith would get the win in the 300 hurdles (50.56) while Taitlyn Trenshaw was a double winner in the 100 (13.33) and 200 (28.41) dashes. Andrea Tuttle doubled in the pole vault with a career-best 9’0″ and also took the long jump at 14’05”.
“On paper on the heat sheets, NorthWood pointed out to beat us by 15,” Lancaster said. “So we challenged our kids to try to beat anybody in a black shirt. We just had to go out and compete, regardless of the place.”
Wawasee will compete this Saturday at the John Reed Relays hosted by East Noble then wrap up the regular season at home against Concord and Memorial next Tuesday. The Northern Lakes Conference meet is May 13 at Warsaw.