Panther track and field are 3A West Champions.
After sweeping the Mountain Seven Conference meet May 2, on May 12 Franklin traveled to North Lincoln for the 3A West Regional meet, where they locked horns with other elite WNC teams for a berth to the 3A Outdoor State Championship. In claiming men’s and women’s regional titles and advancing to state in more than two dozen events, Franklin will arrive at North Carolina A&T as clear contenders May 19.
“I feel like we did everything that we needed to do to be prepared for next week,” said men’s head coach Matt Harlfinger of the team’s clean sweep in Lincoln County. “The entire indoor season was devoted to hitting your qualifying marks so you could go to the state meet. In the outdoor season, you’ve got to hit the top four in the regional to qualify for the state meet, so we were able to check a lot of boxes yesterday. On the boys’ side, I don’t think we left anything on the table – I think we got everybody through that we felt like we could. On the girls’ side, we maybe missed out on one or two opportunities.”
Having entered regionals as a top team in the 3A West, a multitude of Panthers turned in state-qualifying performances, including several regional champions and new school records.
“Elijah Cochran broke the school record again in the 110-meter hurdles – he ran 15.25 [seconds] and broke his own school record,” said Harlfinger. “The girls [4x100-meter relay] team broke the school record, and that’s a record that’s been around for a while. ... Laura Covarrubias ran the second-fastest time in school history in the 300 hurdles, the boys 4x200 team missed the school record by like two tenths of a second, and the boys [4x400] team missed the school record by like .08.”
In addition to new school records from Cochran and the girls 4x100 team of Michelle Ortega, Covarrubias, Hope Smith and Isabelle Duchemin, Franklin qualified for state in an incredibly wide range of events. In the pole vault, reigning 3A Indoor State Champions Blake Cassada and Boston Stringer advanced to the outdoor state meet, with Cassada placing first on the men’s side with a 14’0” vault and Stringer placing second among women at 9’6”. Franklin will again send three men to the state Championship, with Adam Rogers placing third with a 13’6” and Aaron Jennings placing fourth with a 13’0”.
In the mid-distance events, Franklin earned two more gold medals, with Isaiah Roots winning the 400-meter dash (49.07 seconds) and Logan Russo fighting off a late challenge from the field to take the 800-meter run (2:01.44). In addition to Cassada, Roots and Russo, the Panthers also claimed a regional titles in the men’s 4x400-meter relay (Cochran, Justin Rodriguez, Roots, Cal Drake; 3:24.24). All told, Franklin qualified for state in 23 events, more than enough to make a run at a state title.
“We’ve got nine scoring opportunities on the girls’ side, and West Henderson won the outdoor state meet last year with six scoring opportunities,” said Harlfinger. “If I had to guess, there’s gonna be some schools that will maybe have more than us, but nine is a lot. On the boys’ side we’ve got 14 opportunities, which, a lot of times, that should be enough.”
With 14 individuals and relay teams placing in the top four, the Panther men were clearly the class of the 3A West, earning 110 points to host team North Lincoln’s 83.5. While the Panther women had to sweat out their regional title, beating out North Lincoln narrowly 79-73, Harlfinger believes one of the team’s best athletes should improve her fitness this week.
“I was really proud of Isabelle,” he said of the team’s star senior. “She’s one that, during the second week of the season, she got knocked down going over a hurdle and rolled her ankle. ... For a long time there during the indoor season, she was really almost untouchable. Then, she nearly broke her ankle and so she was out 6-8 weeks, and then we’re trying to piece together, ‘How can we run?’”
Despite still nursing an injury from Franklin’s third meet of the season March 24, Duchemin amazingly placed third in the 100-meter hurdles (15.87), in addition to anchoring the school-record 4x100-meter relay. With both men’s and women’s regional titles, it seems difficult to keep track of all of Franklin’s state meet qualifiers, and Harlfinger says that’s according to plan.
“That was something we talked about leading up to the indoor state meet, because it was so important to have all those qualifying marks hit heading in,” he said. “My message to them going into that championship was, every time that they shoot the starting gun, I want somebody in the stadium to say, ‘Oh my God, Franklin’s got somebody in this group too?’ I wanted somebody nervous that we might score in the [55-meter hurdles], and then in the [300-meter dash] and the [500-meter dash] and the [1,000-meter run].”
After winning the men’s 3A indoor state title and falling a single point shy of winning the women’s, Franklin staked a claim as one of the state’s premier 3A programs this February. While they will face steep competition at Friday’s Outdoor State Championship, most notably from meet favorite and Women’s Indoor State Champions Dudley, Harlfinger said the team controls their own destiny.
“The message for the team is gonna be a little bit of a reminder of things that we talked about leading up to this,” he said of the team’s practices this week. “We won both championships, which was great, but I kind of got the [feeling] that we had some people really disappointed with how they performed. ... The message is gonna be ‘We did our job, we’re where we’re supposed to be; now let’s refocus, stay hungry and go after this title run.”