On April 18, the track team competed at the the PAL 4 tournament where the long distance team showed a significant improvement, with junior Noah Strause’s 2:07.89 800M winning the event for Aragon, an improvement of 13.25 seconds from last year, and junior Beata Gold running a 12:03.55 3200M, an improvement of 52.29 seconds from last year’s 12:55.84
“Distance has improved a lot, since it’s pretty easy to improve in distance as you get a lot of results really quickly,” Gold said.
However, there has been a large amount of high-performing freshmen in the long distance event as well, with many athletes returning from cross country.
“We’ve got a lot of new promising freshman, there’s a new promising sprinter, [Ian Ko] and a new distance runner,” Gold said. “ We [also] had cross country and those same people came back … there’s a lot of continued athletes.”
Another change has been a focus on well-roundedness, as the Dons have many athletes in multiple events.
“We have several athletes in more than one discipline here,” said head coach Dino Delyani. “We closely monitor what events they’ve been doing and making sure they have a balanced amount of practice at all their different events.”
The new attention given to multi-event athletes has shown significant improvement. Sophomore Owen Dodge improved his high jump from 5’0 to 5’4 and his 1600M time to 4:50.31 from 4:59.18. Additionally, senior Juliet Bost placed first among aragon athletes for three different events, including her 9’6 Pole Vault.
During this meet, sophomore Ryan Tomooka has also benefited from the changes made for multisport athletes, who, despite competing in three different events, was able to improve his 100M sprint time from 13.39 to 12.57, outpacing some upperclassmen with an almost one second change.
