Make it two in a row for Panther men’s track.
After taking home an Indoor State Championship in February, Franklin became the team to beat in the 3A Division this outdoor season, entering every meet with a proverbial target on their backs. After taking every other team’s best shot and coming out standing, Matt Harlfinger’s squad achieved a remarkable feat, capping their historic year with a 3A Outdoor Men’s state title.
“The indoor state meet was a little bit different, in that we kind of went in and we thought that we were favored to win it – we kind of were in control the whole time and felt like we were in control,” said Harlfinger. “It’s a completely different dynamic from indoors to outdoors. There’s a lot more talented athletes outdoors than indoors because a lot of those basketball players show up, and they’re really good in the long jump and the high jump. … We kind of went into it knowing on the boys side we had a chance, but it wasn’t as realistic as the indoor season. We were really gonna have to work for it.”
As the more popular of the two track seasons for athletes around the state, outdoor track features stiffer competition than indoor, drawing many athletes who play other sports in fall and winter. After winning the 3A West Regional at North Lincoln High School May 12, Franklin entered the state meet May 19 as a clear contender, but turned in some surprising results in the early events.
“We started out a little flat in our first two events, where we thought we could maybe score a point or two and didn’t make the finals,” said Harlfinger. “We really needed everything to go our way to pull this thing off, and then the boys [4x800-meter relay] ran. They went in ranked 12th and they got third, and bumped out one of the schools that we thought was gonna be there at the end in Dudley. … That was a nine-point swing, and we only won by five-and-a-half points, so that one event really set the tone for the rest of the day.”
With a bronze-medal 8:14.69 performance from Aaron Ashe, Barrett Stork, Matheson Post and Logan Russo, Franklin killed two birds with one stone, earning points for themselves and bumping meet favorites Dudley back one place. From there, the two teams stayed neck-and-neck throughout the day, no thanks to a clerical error that nearly robbed the Panthers of valuable points.
“Right in the middle of the boys pole vault – and this kind of messed up the pole vaulters, too, because I told them I’d be there the whole time – they posted the triple jump results, and I noticed immediately that Cal was in ninth place,” said Harlfinger. “He was supposed to get three more jumps in the finals, and so I had to go find the field event referee and file a protest. … 30 minutes after the triple jump was complete, Cal Drake got three more jumps, and he was mad, he was motivated. … The first jump in the finals, he moved up to fourth place, and in doing so, he bumped two of the Dudley guys backwards. So had we not filed that protest and gotten Cal Drake three more jumps, we would have lost the state meet by half a point.”
After not being named among the eight initial finalists, Drake proved he belonged among the state’s best, turning in a fourth-place 43’6.5” leap on his first attempt. Despite not having Harlfinger’s coaching for a large part of the event, Franklin’s pole vaulters also turned in a strong day, with senior Blake Cassada defending his indoor state title from February with a 13’6” vault. Sophomore Adam Rogers and junior Aaron Jennings placed fifth and seventh, respectively, both clearing 12’6 in different numbers of attempts.
Following the pole vault, which took place later in the day, Franklin tried to calculate how the point from that event would effect their overall standing in the meet. Entering the final event of the day, the 4x400-meter relay, the picture finally became clear.
“Finally, the points show up on the scoreboard and we’re in first place, and so then we kind of controlled our own destiny,” said Harlfinger. “We knew that we had to beat Dudley, and by that point Croatan was 12 points behind us, and you can only score 10 points [per event]. We knew that if they won they still couldn’t beat us, so we just had to beat Dudley in the four-by-four. We edged them out – we got third, and they got fourth.”
With a third-place, 3:24.41 relay from Elijah Cochran, Justin Rodriguez, Drake and Isaiah Roots, Franklin cemented the 3A outdoor state title, earning 59.5 points to Dudley’s 54 and Croatan‘s 51. It is the team’s first outdoor state title since 1995.
Women
In addition to the Panther men, Franklin’s female athletes also impressed at the state meet. In tying West Cartaret for third with 35 points behind Dudley (70) and Statesville (49), Harlfinger said the Panther women had exceeded expectations.
“The girls got third, which we were actually really proud of,” he said. “We just dealt with so many injuries during the outdoor season on the girls’ side, it was really unfortunate. Going in, I felt like we had a shot at a top-five finish, but I honestly felt like we were gonna get sixth place. But, any opportunity those girls have to step up and perform, they do it. They overperform in the biggest moments, and they’ve always outperformed by projections.”
After finishing just a point behind Dudley for second in the 3A Indoor Championship, several Panther women have missed significant time to injuries this season, including team pillars Hope Smith, Isabelle Duchemin and others. Despite this, Franklin turned in some eye-opening results.
“Boston Stringer did well in the pole vault; she came in ranked seventh and took third, so that was great. She kind of over-performed her projection,” said Harlfinger of the junior 3A Indoor State Champion. “Laura Covarubias is just an animal – she took second place in the 300 hurdles and nearly broke our school record, which is a really tough school record to break. She nearly beat Emma Hall, who’s the two-time defending state Champion, and Laura’s really only been a hurdler now for about eight weeks. … The girls 4x200 team broke the school record, and then the girls four-by-one team finished third.”
Between Stringer, the short-distance relay team of Duchemin, Covarrubias, Smith, freshman Michelle Ortega and others, Franklin turned in several of the meet’s top results. With both teams earning top-three finishes on the 3A Division’s biggest stage, Halrfinger credited both teams for their camaraderie.
“For me, it was a lot of fun because the meet hung in the balance in that last event,” he said of the men’s 4x400. “It was kind of like going into overtime and hitting a buzzer-beater or something. … We’ve just continued to remind them that we can accomplish more together than they can accomplish as individuals. The strength of our team this year was the fact that we were a team. The team culture is through the roof right now – they really support each other, they really pull for each other, they really lift each other up, excite each other and push each other.”