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06/07/2006: "CHS girls win third straight state track crown"

Thrice as nice.
Threepeat.
Third time’s a charm.
Use whichever, or all the cliches you can think of ... the sole fact is Crofton reigns once more over the Class C field in girls track and field.
The Lady Warriors scored their third straight team title at the State Track Meet over the past weekend, May 19-20. Crofton outpointed Kearney Catholic and Omaha Brownel-Talbot by three points. CHS scored 43 while the other two schools carded 40 points each to tie for runnerup honors. The top 10 in the Class C team chase was: Crofton 43, Kearney Catholic 40, Omaha Brownell-Talbot 40, Howells 33, Exeter-Milligan 30, Lincoln Lutheran 25, Yutan 25, Concordia 24, Grand Island Central Catholic 22.5, and Randolph 22.

While Crofton got its anticipated 30 points from junior Amber Hegge’s triple repeat of state titles in the high jump, long jump and triple jump, the Lady Warriors got additional help where they hoped they might, as sophomore Morgan Wilken struck gold in the discus, and got sixth in the shotput, and freshgman Bree Wendte earned a sixth place medal in the 400 and the 1600 relay team grabbd sixth place too. Aside from Hegge and Wendte, the relay quartet included Tara Harmelink and Brooke Nelson.
This one might have been a little more special for CHS head track coach Gary Timm, who after 18 years at the Crofton girls track helm, will be leaving for an administrative position in Pierce.
Always cautious about his team’s chances, Timm was asked, following the 1600 relay, how it felt to have the third consecutive title. “Not until the trophy is in our hands,” he smiled.
“We try to put our kids in a place where they can win,” Timm said after the trophy was handed to he and his fellow coaches early Saturday evening on the Omaha Burke High School field. “I felt we had the right athletes in the best places to give us the best possibility to win.”
“It’s really nice to have an athlets like Amber,” Timm noted. But then he quickly added, “But we had a lot of kids step up big and that helped us a lot.”
Crofton joins an elite trip of schools to have won Class C state titles three times in a row. Hastings St. Cecilia won seven straight crowns from 1971 to 1977, and Lincoln Christian coollected three straight titles in 1989-91.
Timm deflected a question about his coaching ability by saying, “I do a lot of managing; coaching a bit, but a lot of managing. When things get to this point in the season, you pretty much know what everybody can do, so it’s a matter of fitting things together to create the best possibile situation to get the win.”
A certain part of that “fitting” was practically a no-brainer, as Hegge, a junior, spent the season as the defending champion in the three jumping events. In fact, she was the two-time defending champion in the high jump and triple jump.
Hegge got things off to a good start on Friday when she captured her second straight long jump title, leaping 18’1.25” to best Charista Zehnder, Concordia, who took second with 17’10.5”. Hegge pretty much wrapped the competition up on her first jump, when she touched the sand a shade over 18 feet. No one came close the rest of the competition.
“I felt good through the competition, but I just wasn’t getting good jumps,” Hegge said afterward. “But hey, I improved by an inch over last year’s state meet, and I won. It’s nice to get that first event out of the way.”
Across the Burke High complex, Crofton sophomore also looked as though she had wrappd up first in the discus. Morgan Wilken flipped the platter 128’2 early in the competition and sat stop the leader board well into the finals.
But on her final throw, Bennington’s Elizabeth Christiansen overtook Wilken with a toss of 128’10, leaving Wilken as the last contestant of the competition.
With the calm of a veteran competition, Wilken spun the platter well beyond that top mark, hitting 135’3 to regain the gold medal.
Wilken said she only wanted to make sure her release of the discus was smooth, and that the wind, which was blowing into the contestants faces, would give her a break.
“We had thought Morgan could get third or fourth, so her gold medal was huge for our team chances,” said Timm.
With Brownell-Talbot’s Sarah Lyon setting all-time state records in the preliminaries of two of her three sprint events, it was obvious that the Class C title would be a close finish on Saturday.
Hegge got the Lady Warriors on track with her win in the triple jump Saturday morning. Intermittent rains forced officials to delay the competition a couple times, someteing Hegge said didn’t bother her at all. In fact, it was the lack of competitors Hegge missed.
“I just wish there would have been someone here to push me,” she said after beating the runnerup by over two feet. Hegge touched the pit at 37’3.75, easily outdistancing Tri County’s Lexi Strouf, who measured 35’ and third placer Olivia Dwiggins of Gibbon, who recorded 34’10.
With the long jump gold secured, Hegge moved over to the high jump area to try and defend her two-gold titles.
In the meantime, freshman Bree Wendte, who the day before had run a personal best time of 1:02.277 to quqalify for the finals in the open 400, dispelled any fears of a “frosh fold” and ran to sixth place in the finals with a time of 1:02.936. Wendte said she was happy to have earned a medal in her first trip to the state meet, but was a bit disappointed that she wasn’t able to better her Friday time.
Crofton fans, though still wary of Brownell-Talbot and Kearney Catholic’s opportunities to overtakes the Lady Warriors’ 31 points, breathed a sigh of relief when Hegge dismissed her high jump competition quickly. All opponents were gone by the time the bar reached 5’4, leaving Hegge with only decisions about how high she wanted to try left.
Those decisions got the Crofton fans excited as Hegge continued sliding over the bar at 5’6, 5’7, 5’8 and finally 5’9, which tied the Class C state meet rcord, set by Jana Hochstetler, of Centura, im 1989. Hegge had the bar nudged up a record-breaking 5’9.25, and gave onlookers three near misses before bowing out.
“I wanted to come down here and improve on what I had done last year,” Hegge said. “But I didn’t think I’d get that high.”
Hegge noted again, that the lack of compeititon forced her to utilize other methods to dig deep for new heights. “I look to see what the results are from the other classes that have jumped, and try and compete against them,’ she stated. “I just try and find some kind of competition wherever I can.”
Her 5’9 mark was not only a personal best for Hegge, as well as a new school record, but it also garnered her a special honor, the All-Class Gold Medal, for having the highest height among the four class winners, A, B, C, and D.
Later, Hegge admitted that the high jump gold was her favorite “because I got a personal best and won the all-class gold.”
But the Lady Warriors’ two foes on the scoreboard kept edging closer. With her fourth gold medal of the day secured, Lyons had pushed Brownell-Talbot to 40 points, one behind Crofton and 10 ahead of Kearney Catholic.
But then Wilken came back with another solid effort in the shotput, as she placed sixth, hitting her personal best of 37’7 to give CHS one more point in the team chase.
Though coach Timm refused to accept victory, there was no way the Lady Warriors could be caught as the meet headed into the final event, the 1600 relay. Brownell-Talbot did not have an entry in the event, and Kearney Catholic, which brought the fastest time of the season into th race, could do no better than earn 10 more points, leaving both teams behind CHS.
Kearney Catholic did win the race, but the Crofton girls slipped into sixth spot, scoring one more point. The quartet of Brooke Nelson, Tara Harmelink, Wendte and Hegge ran 4:10.48 to get the final medal spot and give Crofton a three-point margin of victory.
A obviously tired Hegge sat on the track, in the finishing area, following the relay, and could do nothing more than smile. “We came down here and really did well,” she sighed before taking a drink of water to try and cool some of the 80-degree heat. “Everybody did the things we needed them to do to win.”
While the girls who scored plays a big role in bringing another state trophy to the CHS trophy case, they weren’t the only athletes who participated in the state meet over the weekend.
Brittney Lammers made 9’ in the girls pole vault to finish in 10th. Tierney Schumacher, also in the pole vault, did not clear opening height, as did Maddy Larsen in the girls high jump.
On the boys’ side of things, Cody LaCroix, a senior, threw the shotput 48’4.75 to finish in 10th place. Junior Eric Peitz hit 144’2 in the discus to finished 5 inches out of the medals in seventh place. Sophomore Scot Donner cleared 12’6 in his second state meet pole vault and ran 23.472 in his preliminary heat of the 200. Another junior, Andrew Goeden, ran 16.152 in his prelims heat of the 110-meter high hurdles and the 1600 relay team of seniors Nick Hegge and Cody Wilken, plus sophomore Tanner Foxhoven and freshman Calvin Mueller raced to 3:33.324, good for ninth place.
Timm, who has spent the last 21 years coaching track in varying situations, including Crofton’s boys and girls head coach for the last three, explained, “We really try and keep things in perspective for the kids. We tell them family comes first, school second and track is down the list a ways.”
“At the start of the season, we tell the kids what we want to accomplish and how we fell it can happen,’ Timm added. “Our kids always buy into the plan, and then go out and work hard to make it happen.”
As he surveyed the collection of CHS fans and athletes, Timm smiled and said, “I’m gonna be bleeding maroon for a long, long time.”
Whomever steps into Timm’s shoes as head track coach will have a certain advantage in that of the 16 athletes, girls and boys, who competed in Omaha this past weekend for Crofton, only four were seniors, three boys and just one girl. Okay, it’s only a week after winning a third straight state title ... but can you say “Foursome”?