Worst Seat In The House: Run along now

Sorry about not having a column last week but an unforeseen event took place that didn’t allow me enough time to write something last week. That does happen now and then. Oh well, what can I say? I’ve run out of excuses. A couple of weeks ago the Undeberg Invitational took place at Jimmie Snider Field in Ritzville and it was great to see all of the young competitors.

The weather was not conducive to competitors setting records. Mark and Dan Meyer made their annual trek from the Olympia area to help with the long jump and triple jump. This get together is something I look forward to as much as visiting with the high school athletes from around eastern Washington. I know they have a lot of fun and appreciate Mr. Whitmore saying hi and thanking them for being a part of this great event.

The way the jumping pit is set up the boys’ are jumping into the wind. I think that most of the competitors probably were about 2 – 3 feet short of their best jumps for the year. I told the last group of jumpers that the wind was going to win today and just give it their best effort. Otherwise the weather was going to get into their head and they would have a real hard time and give up easily. It is on days like that where some kids will use the adverse conditions as a good practice and make sure they had their steps down while others were going to not worry about it and move on not letting the weather break their spirit and come back strong at the next meet.

Living in this part of the world we really don’t know what kind of weather we will have from one week to the next and the district and state championships can be rainy or windy or both. This just tells me that we can talk about the weather all we want but we certainly can’t do anything about it. I wish I knew who said that first. I would have quoted them.

What I like about meets like this is the large number of schools from 1B to 2A that are competing. The overall team winner for boys was 1A Royal. However, 1B Oakesdale came away with the girls’ title. Royal has a lot of good athletes that can get points for team competition. Yet the top three finishers in the long jump were 1B kids. The top three in the triple jump were 1A athletes.

On the girls’ side, Oakesdale also has some really good athletes and the winners of the jumps were again 1B kids. What does that mean? It means there are a lot of good athletes from all of the schools but it becomes a strength in numbers situation for team titles. Unless of course a team has two or three dominating athletes that can finish in the top three in several events which leads to a lot of points and can lead to a state championship which is the overall goal in the long run.

In years past we would often hear someone say that their jump was a PR for them but it wasn’t easy to have any of those that last Saturday in April because of wind conditions, except for one young man from Moses Lake Christian who didn’t have a mark until April 28. That day on his first official jump of the season he jumped far enough to put him in the final. I believe he finished fourth overall.

Those stories are fun to see on a personal level because of the weather, doing something new at a big meet and succeeding against some very fine athletes.

In a little over two weeks state championships will be decided for spring sports. When the season began the last of February practically all of the tracks, baseball and softball fields, tennis courts and golf courses in eastern Washington were covered in snow. Here we are a little over two months later basking in 80 degree weather. Unfortunately the spring sport kids probably will never reach their peak performances because of those delays but it is what it is in the beautiful northwest.

So run along kids and in these next two weeks give your best efforts. I’m rooting for you!