GR girls cruise at districts
Sprinter/jumper Corners wins 4 events, Hawks win team title by nearly 100 points
About all that was missing from Gila Ridge’s Mia Corners’ stellar 2016 campaign was an individual title in a sprinting event at districts.
On Wednesday at Veterans Memorial Stadium, Corners made up for her second-place finishes in the 100- and 200-meter dashes at last year’s Yuma Union High School District Track and Field Championships by winning both events this time around.
Oh, and the sophomore standout also defended her titles in the long jump and the triple jump.
Behind Corners’ four event victories and a plethora of other notable showings, the Gila Ridge girls team cruised to the team title at Wednesday’s five-team meet, totaling 177.5 points to more than double-up second-place Cibola (84).
The Hawks won 13 of 17 events and produced a trio of multi-event individual champs — Corners, sophomore Hanah Sims (pole vault, high jump) and junior Savannah Stewart (discus, shot put).
Corners, who edged teammate (and last year’s champ) Hannah Weller in the two shorter sprints, was the meet’s only four-event champ (boys or girls).
“My focus was just to run good races, try to stay strong and run for my team so we could win city,” said Corners, the reigning Yuma Sun/ Yuma Rotary Club Girls Track Athlete of the Year. “I didn’t really focus on (last year’s districts showing), because I didn’t want that to be my motivation. I wanted to do it for myself and my team.”
Not surprisingly, Corners and Wellers — who combined for four top-five finishes at last year’s Division II state meet — were each other’s only real competition all day long.
Corners edged Weller by threehundredths of a second in the 100 meters (11.87 to 11.90, hand time), and by about half-a-second in the 200 meters (24.69 to 25.14). The third-place times in those events were 12.53 (Gila Ridge’s Brielle Hill) and 26.52 (Cibola’s Mori Gordon), respectively.
Corners won the long jump at 17 feet, 5 inches; Weller took second at 17 feet, 1 inch — nearly three feet ahead of the next-best mark (Hill).
And Corners won the triple jump by about three feet (at 33’4), while Weller won the 400-meter dash (for the second year in a row) by four seconds (in 1:01.72).
“I just wanted Hannah and I to
finish first and second in all of our events,” Corners said.
Of course, they weren’t the only two who starred.
Sims won the high jump for the second year in a row, finishing with a mark of 5 feet (winning the tiebreaker over Kofa’s Keiley Sharp). And her winning pole-vault mark of 8 feet, 6 inches was a foot better than the next-best (teammate Kaitlyn Cofske).
Stewart, who did not place top three in either throwing event at last year’s district meet, won the discus at 112 feet, 2.5 inches and the shot put at 33 feet, 5 inches.
The dominant showing as a team came despite the fact that Gila Ridge was without junior standout Clara Haynes, easily the area’s top girls distance runner. Haynes’ absence allowed for three firsttime district champs to be crowned — Gila Ridge se“I’m nior Skylar Kammann in the 800 meters (2:37.3), Cibola freshman Ashley Valenzuela in the 1,600 meters (5:54.04) and Kofa junior Yulissa Avila in the 3,200 meters (12:39.50).
Rounding out the individual event winners were Kofa sophomore Karen Rivas, who defended her title in the 300-meter hurdles with ease (46.61), and Gila Ridge sophomore Faith Lopez, who won the 100-meter hurdles in 16.79.
Kofa took third as a team with 66 points, while San Luis (23) and Yuma High (8.5) finished fourth and fifth, respectively.