by Lucas DiBlasi
“It feels great…winning the state [championship] feels like you’ve done something,” said senior Ephraim Bird from Hope Academy.
Last season, the Minnehaha Academy boys’ track and field team, paired with runners from Hope Academy, reached one of the highest levels of achievement for a high school sport: winning the state championship.
Senior Jonathan Webb set the school record in the 400 meter dash with a time of 49.33 seconds, senior Sam Lundquist set the Minnehaha school record in the 300 meter hurdles with a time of 38.32 seconds, and now-graduated M.A. students Ben Gifford and Ethan Wagner along with Webb and Lundquist set the Minnehaha school record in the 4×400 relay with a time of 3:22:00 seconds.
“Not only are we going to, numerically, put our people in the best possible positions to score the most points at the most important meets of the year,” said head coach and English teacher Kris Sauer, “but we also have some pretty good athletes as well, and at the state level, that usually is a recipe for success.”
The work is not over. Sauer expresses that the coaching staff is still going to train athletes the same way this upcoming season. They still need to do more work, Bird agrees, to win a second state championship.