Final high school track and field event starts today
Besides being the only state in the union that has a high school Meet of Champions event, Arkansas also has a state high school Decathlon and Heptathlon championship event which starts Wednesday, May 18, at the Ramay track in Fayetteville.
Well over 50 schools are signed up to participate in the two-day event. There are no classification breakdowns so whether athletes are from a big school or a little, they will be battling for the same awards. Boys’ events begin at 10 a.m. with the girls set to go at 10:30 a.m.
Wednesday’s events for the boys’ decathlon include, in order: 100-meter dash, long jump, shot put, high jump, and 400-meter run. The girls’ events, in order, include: 100-meter hurdles, long jump, discus and the 200-meter dash.
Tomorrow, the boys will begin at 9 a.m. with the 110-meter high hurdles, followed by discus, pole vault, triple jump and 1,500-meter run. The girls will have three events beginning at 9 a.m., including the high jump, shot put, and 800-meter run.
The events are all scored from an official table. Placing has nothing to do with the scoring other than the knowledge that beating someone else will mean that you will score more than them in that event. Every increment of time or distance will affect the scoring.
Last season, former Blackhawk great Blakelee Winn swept to a victory in the girls’ competition, the first Pea Ridge athlete to ever do so in the multievent competition. She currently runs for Pittsburg State University and was an indoor multi-event All -American. She has done well outdoors this spring in heptathlon competition.
Possible Blackhawk contenders include Kamree Dye, Dallice White and Cade Mann who all competed in the 2021 Championships. Among 4A competitors in 2021, White was sixth best in Arkansas with Dye in the Top 10 at 10th. Mann was eighth in the 4A overall last year among the boys.
If all three are in the mix this season, they will be all the more ready having already experienced it. All three have sharply improved skills from a year ago so their prospects are sunnier from 2021.
The multi-event competitions are derived from the original Olympic Games that began in Greece 700 BC, more than 2,700 years ago. It was a five event pentathlon, including the long jump, discus throw, javelin throw, 200-meter dash, and, surprisingly to me, wrestling. The wrestling portion didn’t catch on when the Olympics multi-events were restarted in the early 1900s with the first modern decathlon held in 1912.
When America’s Jim Thorpe won the initial decathlon in 1912, the Indian athlete from Pennsylvania was hailed as the world’s greatest athlete by the king of Sweden who was the host of that years Olympics. Every since then, the winner of the multi-events gets proclaimed as the world’s greatest athlete.
It is easy to see why such a title is appropriate as it takes all kinds of athletic skills to successfully compete in that sport. You have to be able to run fast, jump hurdles, run far, jump high, jump far, throw steel balls, spears and heavy discs to win a competition. There are lot of different strengths to master.
Finally, it is an event where you can never let up. You don’t know what other athletes are doing and unless you are carrying a computer around with you, you really don’t know your standing until you leave the field.
Years ago, I was coaching an athlete in a summer decathlon competition at the University of Kansas. My athlete was trailing the leader from St. Louis by several hundred points headed into the 1,500-meter run, the final event. The St. Louis kid had won every event contested to date, nine of nine. He had the notion that he had the meet was locked up, and since it was a very hot day in Kansas, he just dogged the final event. He jogged so slow, he scored “zero” and when my kid ran a 5:05 and scored several hundred points, he got just enough points to beat the St. Louis kid who was very surprised when the final totals were announced, to say the least.
It’s been a great year for track and field on the Ridge. Good to Great, with an emphasis on the Great.