Last Sunday, a select group of runners from Andover Girls and Boys Indoor Track competed in the Greater Boston Track Club (GBTC) Open Invitational at Harvard. At the meet, Andover competed against high school, collegiate and club teams. Participating teams included Exeter, Governor’s, Harvard, Franklin Pierce, St. Anselm Track Club and the Greater Boston Track Club. The Harvard track facility includes a high quality 200-meter indoor track. Because the track features longer straightaways than Andover’s track in the Case Memorial Cage, it allowed runners to post significantly improved times. “Although the times cannot be compared to outdoor times, they are always much faster than the times we post on our indoor track, so it’s a great confidence boost for our runners,” wrote Kinsey Yost ’15 in an email to The Phillipian. Andover Girls dominated both short distance and long distance events. Camille Little ’16 nabbed first place in the preliminary round of the 60-Meter Dash with a time of 8.02 and continued to win the final 60-Meter Dash with an improved time of 7.89 seconds. Little also claimed first place in the Invitational 200-Meter Dash with a time of 26.11 seconds. Girls Captain Charlie Jarvis ’15 took first place in the regular 200-Meter Dash with a time of 27.42 seconds. A runner from Exeter finished second, and Yost finished in 27.65 seconds, good for third place. Distance runner Grace Rademacher ’18 snatched second place in the One-Mile. Rademacher finished with a time of 5:30.34, only three seconds behind the first place runner from RUN, a club team from Acton, Mass. Anoush Shehadeh ’15 finished the One-Mile in 5:41.06 minutes and took third place. Andover Boys Indoor Track found success against top-tier competition in the long-distance events. Every distance runner who competed in the meet set a new personal record or season’s best time. Ralph Skinner ’16 clinched first place in the One-Mile with a time of 4:40. Boys Captain John Gorton ’15 finished just behind Skinner with a time of 4:41, good for second place. Skinner said, “There is also a great atmosphere at meets like these. The crowd is great, and you get to compete against athletes from all over the state. I had a great time running the mile with [Gorton].” Sixty-six runners competed in the Boys 200-Meter Dash. Senior Gray Mackall ’15 finished first in his heat with a time of 24.98 and earned 26th place overall. David Onabanjo ’18 took 32nd place overall in the same event. “The purpose of the meet was not so much to win, as to run in a more competitive field on a high quality 200-meter indoor track,” wrote Gorton in an email to The Phillipian. ¨We were hoping that exposing our athletes to this higher level of competition would inspire their best athletic performances and give them a taste of what it is like to run track and field in the world beyond Andover. [This meet] allowed us to gain experience, confidence and even more familiarity with our events.” Andover will look to use its strong individual performances at the GBTC Open Invitational to claim first place in the first quad-meet of the season against Hyde, Governor’s and Wilbraham and Monson on Wednesday.
