SPEEDING THROUGH THE SEASON

April is—besides May of course—the most important month of the high school track season. This March, we’ve had a pretty great start to the season, being only indoors. The Clippers attended four indoor track meets this season: Wartburg, IATC at Iowa State University, Dubuque and the indoor WaMaC conference at Grinnell College. Indoor season is the prelude to the “big show”—as Coach Robison would call it—meaning that it’s the least crucial part of the season. Most lineups for indoor track meets at CCA are a limited mixture of varsity runners who trained outside of school, and those who came to organized (non-mandatory) pre-season practices. This doesn’t mean that indoor season is useless, though. We’ve had plenty of great marks across the board beginning this indoor season. We’ll see how the entire team will fill in here soon for the outdoor season!

Track senior Cade Overman practicing starts; photo by Lilyan Janecek

Our meet at Wartburg started out incredibly strong. Our boys 4x800, our girls 4x200, and our boys 4x400 relays all place 1st overall. At IATC indoor championships, we continued on strong, placing top six for every one of our relay teams. That’s a lot of medals! Our meet lineup for Dubuque consisted of only those who were available during spring break, meaning there was a lot of space for the runners who didn’t get the chance to compete at Wartburg and ISU. Both our girls and boys 1600 medley relays placed 1st. We had a handful of personal bests too. Charlie Steenhoek and Addy Hill ran lifetime bests in the boys 1600m and the girls 800m at Dubuque! Like always, the indoor season was wrapped up with our indoor WaMaC conference. Our girls and boys 4x200 relays both placed 3rd, and, once again, our girls 1600 medley relay placed 1st.

According to coaches, this group of track athletes is among the strongest we’ve had here at CCA. The true charm of CCATF comes from the ability to be good teammates. Despite being an individual sport, track and field is nothing without your teammates. It helps that so many of our athletes participate in an array of sports, bringing what they learn from other teams and the relationships they’ve formed with teammates who share their alternative sports, into track and field. 

At the end of March, as always, the track team hosts an informal “intrasquad” meet, where CCA runners from both the middle and high school race against each other. This is an opportunity to get some good marks, figure out who is good at what, figure out who will be on varsity relays, etc. The intrasquad meet marks the end of indoor season and the beginning of outdoor season. To start off March, we have our JV roster competing at Tipton, and the varsity roster competing at Mount Vernon to follow. Drake Relays kicks off later on during the last week of April, so we’re excited to have some qualifiers compete in that in the future. There is a lot of great stuff to look forward to this track season! Let’s hope for a fun and fruitful season for our track athletes. Go Clippers!