The Girl’s 4×4 relay finished first defeating the first place finisher, North Reading High School, by 11.85 seconds. However, Andover Girls Indoor Track and Field finished the meet in third place with a team score of 25, falling to North Reading High and The Governor’s Academy.
According to Miley Kaufman ’19, before the meet, the captains of both the girls and boys teams encouraged the teams to start off strong in this upcoming long stretch of weekly Wednesday meets.
Kaufman said, “They always give a speech. They gave us a motivational speech about how this is the first in a series of meets on Wednesdays. For the next seven Wednesdays we’ll have meets, so this will be sort of our kickoff to that series.”
Andover has not faced North Reading before, but embraced the opportunity to face a team that posed as much competition as it did, according to Kaufman and Sadie Cheston-Harris ’20.
“North Reading High is really good. They have a really big school and a huge team, so they really have a lot of depth to their team, too, and they’re just very challenging athletes. That was really good competition for us to have because usually we play against Govs who we typically outperform consistently, so it’s nice to have a change in competition,” said Kaufman.
Cheston-Harris said, “Since it was my first time running with North Reading, we kind of expected them to be really good because usually public schools are and they’re a lot bigger than us. They won a lot of the events. It was nice to have better competition to run against. Govs is a good team, but we [have] won against them every meet, so it was nice to switch things up.”
Abby Otterbein PG ’19, according to Charlotte Whitehurst ’22, really stood out in multiple events, especially the 4×400 relay.
“… she’s [Otterbein] insane at track. She’s so fast. She does like all the events, and she anchors in all the relays and she’s so good at sprinting and long distance,” said Whitehurst.
According to Kaufman, Andover practice and improvement in footwork for field events really paid off this meet.
Kaufman said, “Throwing, something we’ve been working on a lot in practice is footwork, and I saw that throughout all of my teammates and I think I also improved in this too, we all had our footwork down really well, and I think that really helped us throw farther.”
For the future, Andover hopes to work on its strength and specifics in relays, according ot Kaufman and Whitehurst.
Kaufman said, “I think with more practice throughout the rest of the season, we keep running, I think we’ll really improve and build strength which will really help us in the future.”
“I guess we want to get faster, and especially for relays. We want to work on hand offs,” said Whitehurst.
Andover will face Andover High and Wilbraham at a home meet next Wednesday.
