By Nakyia Holmes
On Friday, February 24, 2023, at 4:00 pm, there was a larger invitational track meet at Lake Mineola High School. Lake Mineola, Weeki Wachee, as well as thirty other schools, participated. Lake Mineola High School posted the schedule to the coaches, who shared with the students how fast the meet would go and when their events would start. Due to the execution of the schedule, many students didn’t get to do the field event they signed up for, unlike Sophomore student Noah Frazier who got to do his event before the cut-off in the fourth flight of Boys Discus.
After the announcer called for the first call for the field events, students went into action to get to their event. The first delay they ran across was the judge who was supposed to mark the Javelin throwers was late and stuck in traffic. The second delay was the long pauses in between call times. When you go to a track meet it is no secret that they last all day, but to shorten the time there, they needed to call for check-ins sooner rather than waiting 8-15 minutes at a time. This caused delays, little by little, slowly making the meet go from 20 minutes behind to an hour and thirty minutes behind.
The third delay that came up was during the Girls’ 100-meter hurdles races. After the first flight of girls did their race when it was time for the second flight, the clock to mark the times stopped working. After talking with the assistant coach of Weeki Wachee, AJ Holmes, he said, “until they can figure out what is wrong with the clock, everyone just had to sit tight until then.” The races were pushed back more because of this, and by the time they could get the clock to work, it was around 6 pm, and they made it halfway to the fourth flight of Boys Discuss. During this time, a Weeki Wachee student was doing his final throw for his flight.
The sun had set, and it was completely dark when the judge made the call “athletes could no longer throw due to it being too dangerous for the markers to go to the discuss without possibly being hit, and it being too dark to see where the discus landed to measure the throw, I’m sorry, but discus for the girls is canceled.” After hearing this, many of the girl field athletes were very upset about their event being canceled.
The time was now seven thirty, and the field events held on the football field are still going on due to the lights being needed to light the track. During this time, some of the athletes that do field and running events started to feel overwhelmed by having to do their field event and quickly get to their running event. Around eight twenty, they had done boys 4×100, and they still had ten events to do. Some of the events had as many as nine flights and others as little as three.
The track meet at Lake Mineola ended around midnight, and soon after, students from different schools boarded their buses and headed home. By the time Weeki Wachee students got the school, it was 1:30. Weeki Wachee student Kaily Guilfuchi said, “I was really glad to be home after a long day. I got home around 2:15, took a shower, and went to sleep.”
