Sprinter just keeps getting faster
Tri-State Sports & News Service
Monday night, just two days after her high school track season ended, one of the state’s elite sprinters was working out, training for outdoor nationals later this month.
“I don’t get a break yet,” Hunter Robinson said, laughing.
That’s not to say that Robinson, who just completed her junior year at Avonworth,has not digested all that she accomplished this spring. She said she thought about it a bit over theweekend.
It was probably a lot to take in considering it was one of the best seasons by a sprinterin WPIAL history.
This Hunter spent the past few months hunting titles and the amount of success she had was truly extraordinary. The highlights: Robinson swept the sprints (100-, 200- and 400-meter dashes) at the WPIAL Class 3A championships, setting a meet record in the 400. She won the 100 and 200 and took second in the 400 at the PIAA championships while singlehandedly leading Avonworth to a fourth-place finish in the team standings. Andshe blazed to a few of the fastest times in WPIAL historythis season — running a 54.49 in the 400 (No. 2 all time) and 24.25 in the 200 (No. 6 all time).
“I think it was a really big success,” Robinson said. “Just thinking about it, it’s like, ‘Wow’, it’s been a really amazing season. I’ve been really blessed this season with no injuries. I was able to run the entire season and my times got better each timeI ran.”
Robinson expanded her WPIAL and PIAA gold medal collection to eight. She won two WPIAL gold medals and one PIAA gold medal her sophomore season. At last weekend’s PIAA championships, Robinson became just the second girl in the past 20 years to place in the top two in all three sprints (Laurel Highlands’ Breehana Jacobs won all three in 2007). Robinson won the 100 before finishing as the runner-up in the 400, a race she won while competing in Class 2A last season. While disappointed in that result, Robinson bounced backby winning the 200.
Burrell’s Nikki Scherer has been one of Robinson’s biggest rivals and is an outstanding sprinter in her own right, winning four gold medals at the WPIAL Class 2A championships and another at the PIAA championships. Scherer watched Robinson run a few races at the PIAA meet, including the 200 when Robinson edged out Cheltenham’s Chanel Brissett, one of the nation’s top hurdlers and also an excellent sprinter. Brissett will run at Southern California.
“She’s so versatile,” Scherersaid of Robinson. “What she did Saturday was really impressive. I just watched her 100 from the fence. I saw her win that. She just looks effortless when she runs. She ran the 200 against Chanel Brissett, who’s obviously amazing in her hurdling and all this stuff, and Hunter just like broke her. It was incredible. Hunter is great. She’s so versatile and such a good runner and she’sa good person, too.”
The toughest part of Robinson’s season was that she rarely had her best friend and sister by her side. Sophomore Hayden Robinson is also one of the best sprinters in the WPIAL, but injured a hamstring early in the season and never fully recovered.
“For her to not be there, it was a little weird, but I was just like, she’ll be back next year,” Hunter said. “I’ll just go out and get this win for her and we’ll race again next year.”
Robinson has another year of high school track ahead of her and is already getting interest from major college programs. She said that making the 2020 Olympicsis a goal of hers, too.
Her coach, Brian Veshio, said that Robinson still has room to grow and also build onher legacy.
Said Veshio: “Her work ethic in practice is the one thing I look at and say she could be one of the elite sprinters in the country. I think she already is, really, but I think she could go down as one of the all-time greatsin Pennsylvania.”