Rams Strike Gold
DES MOINES - Every point matters.
For decades, coaches all across the competitive sports spectrum have seized on the team first accountability model that each and every point and place matters.
Nowhere at the Iowa State Track and Field Meet on Saturday was that mantra more evident than in the Class 3A girls title hunt.
Glenwood, seeking its first state championship, held an ever-so-slim 62 to 59.5 lead in the point standings over perennial power Dubuque
Wahlert heading into the final event of the day: the 4x400-meter relay.
The Rams slipped as far back as seventh after the first two legs of the relay, but then battled back. Freshman Abby Hughes picked up three spots to get within fourth and then handed off to another freshman, Coryl Matheny who brought home Glenwood in sixth.
Wahlert would finish fourth, just less than a second better than the Rams’ anchor.
The team points showed an even closer finish.
Glenwood’s three points were just enough to edge the Golden Eagles 65 to 64.5 in the team standings.
The Rams had secured the state title.
By a half a point.
Every. Point. Matters.
Glenwood coach Cory Faust said the entire meet coming down to the final relay and the terse seconds of math that followed was a little nerve wracking.
“Really, all day I kept thinking like ‘What can I do? Did we cover this? Did we talk about that?’” said Faust. “It’s a pretty helpless feeling when you just see them out there but I had a lot of confidence in them. They’re a really good group of kids and competitors, I knew they’d give it their best shot and if you do that it usually turns out good.”
All weekend long the Rams were more than good.
Janette Schraft spearheaded the title run with a four gold medals that puts the senior among some of the historic best to ever run at state.
Schraft won the 3,000-meters, 1,500, 800 and the 400-meter hurdles to become just the eighth female athlete all time to win four individual gold medals at a single state meet. Her 11 career gold medals rank her among the top 10 all-time.
“She’s the real deal,” Faust said of Schraft, who joined the team this year after transferring in from East Mills.
Schraft wasn’t aware she was in such rare company until after her final event, the 1,500.
“That’s the first I’ve heard that,” she said. “I was just doing my thing, doing it for my team and they were all supporting me and I wanted to score as many points as possible for them. I guess the personal gratification isn’t anything I was looking at or thinking about. Just hearing that lifts my spirits and makes the day even better and I didn’t know that was possible.”
Faust said he probably could have made it a little easier on Schraft, an Iowa State recruit, by putting her in a relay but he had confidence she could pull it off.
“It probably would have been a little easier if we had done a distance medley but I thought we were really going for a state championship,” Faust said. “I thought she could win four on her own and then we’d just try and grab a few points here and there to get the win.”
The shuttle hurdle relay team of Audrey Arnold, Marissa Ausdemore, Sami Parr and Elle Scarborough added to the Rams’ gold tally. The quartet won the school’s first relay gold medal with a school-record time of 1:05.51.
Glenwood picked up five crucial points on Friday from it’s 4x200-meter relay team of Sadey Allgood, Bailey Ostrander, Jaeda Wilson and Matheny – but not without controversy.
The Rams were initially disqualified after the race for unspecified reasons but that call was reversed on an appeal by Faust, securing them a fourth place finish.
“Big thanks to Denny White and Jerry Ross,” Faust said. “I think I went back and forth with each of them three times. And they could have just said ‘Get the heck out of here’ but they didn’t. And obviously they went back one more time to the judge and they got it right so that was great.”
The Rams’ tallied 40 points from Schraft’s historic day but it was truly a team effort to get them over the hump for the state title.
Sydney Biermann came back from a 12th place finish in the discus on Thursday to place sixth in the shot put on Friday morning to pick up three points. Wilson added two points with a seventh place finish in the 400-meter dash and Scarborough’s eighth place finish in the 100-meter hurdles and Matheny’s seventh place finish in the high jump each earned a point.
No points were perhaps as big as those three earned in the 4x400.
Faust didn’t even have to tell his team the significance of the final event. They already knew.
“Believe it or not, they had actually spent all morning in the hotel and I only saw and talked with Jaeda face-to-face before hand and she told me they had already done the math,” Faust said. “They are all very smart people. They did the math and said ‘we need to do this and this’ and I said just compete and give it your best shot and it’ll work out.”
On the fourth leg Hughes was pushed to eighth but the freshman passed three other runners to gain ground and set Matheny, also a freshman, up on the final lap.
“Yeah, that was clutch,” Faust said of his Hughes’ effort. “I can’t imagine being a freshman running the 4x4 in your first state championship. She’s got a unique style. I tried to get her to get out faster in the first part of her 400’s this year and I’m not sure that really makes her any faster. She went back to her old style this weekend and I thought she ran real well.”
Closing with a pair of freshman in arguably the biggest moment of the season wasn’t Faust’s intent but more the result of last minute change that flip-flopped Hughes and Abby Schultz in the No. 2 and No. 3 spots.
“Abby did a really good job,” Faust said. “We just tell them whatever you do just don’t slow down, sometimes you got to stay outside. Obviously it worked well in the prelims and good enough in the finals.”
After the race – and after that few minutes of uncertainty – Matheny admitted she and her teammates were on point with their points.
“We talked about it before the race: every point matters, no matter if it’s a point or a half point,” she said. “It obviously paid off. We knew it would be close and it would come down to who had the most heart.”
The Rams’ title closes what’s been a challenging spring for the track teams – and all of Mills County really. Historic flooding that uprooted hundreds and left residents without a drinkable water supply for nearly a month was compounded by the Rams not having a home track to compete or train on. The Glenwood Community School District began its $6 million overhaul to the athletic complex last fall and is not scheduled to be completed until the fall.
“You know, I’ve never heard the kids complain once about not having a track or the water and if they did I didn’t hear it,” Faust said. “They’re really resilient kids, really just good kids. Obviously to do something like this you’ve got to have a lot of good athletes and I’m thankful. I’m really lucky to get to coach them.”
Glenwood Girls State Place Winners
100m dash – 19th place, Bailey Ostrander, 13.42.
400m dash – seventh place, Jaeda Wilson, 1:00.73.
800m run – first place, Janette Schraft, 2:12.28.
1500m run – first place, Schraft, 4:41.53.
3000m run – first place, Schraft, 10:35.49.
100m hurdles – eighth place, Elle Scarborough, 16.03; 17th place, Audrey Arnold, 16.34.
400m hurdles – first place, Schraft, 1:03.50.
4x100m relay – ninth place, Glenwood (Sadey Allgood, Ostrander, Wilson and Scarborough), 51.21.
4x200m relay – fourth place, Glenwood (Allgood, Ostrander, Wilson, Coryl Matheny), 1:45.72.
4x400m relay – sixth place, Glenwood (Wilson, Abby Hughes, Abi Schultz and Matheny), 4:03.60.
4x800m relay – 11th place, Glenwood (Abby McIntyre, Lauren Becker, Erin Schultz and Emma Hughes), 10:02.48.
Sprint medley relay – ninth place, Glenwood (Allgood, Audrey Arnold, Ostrander and Matheny), 1:53.21.
Shuttle hurdle relay – first place, Glenwood (Arnold, Ausdemore, Parr and Scarborough), 1:05.51.
Discus – 12th place, Sydney Biermann, 112’ 10”.
Shot – sixth place, Biermann, 37’ 3.75”.