This year’s City Section track finals at Birmingham High didn’t yield a team title for the Palisades High track teams’as it did last year for the Pali girls’but three Dolphins won their events and a strong overall showing from both the boys and the girls last Thursday highlighted the team’s future potential. The Pali girls finished third with 59 points, just behind runner-up Taft (63) and champion Carson (93), while the boys finished fifth with 28 points, close to second-place Birmingham (36.5) and third-place teams Fairfax and El Camino Real (29), but well off champion Dorsey (110). In individual events, for the girls, sophomore Kendall Gustafson took first in the high jump and senior Jamie Greenberg won the pole vault and for the boys, senior Kolmus Iheanacho took home the shot put title. It was a busy day for Gustafson, in particular. The defending champion in the high jump and 300-meter high hurdles, she competed in four events and found herself in one of the day’s more bizarre scenarios. The girls high jump and long jump events took place simultaneously, forcing her to jump back and forth between each, frantically changing shoes in the process. Then, after clinching the high jump by clearing 5’4” with her competition unable to do so, she readied to go for a personal best of 5’6”. But suddenly the officials for the long jump forced her to stop and insisted she come back to keep her place within the finals rotation, incorrectly citing a rule that she must do so. No matter, Gustafson switched out of her cleats and scurried to the long jump runway. ’It was crazy,’ Gustafson later said. ‘I was literally jumping over the fence in between the events ‘ and I had my dad on one side of the field, I had my coach on the other side, and the officials in between, all saying different things. And I had to pick what to listen to in order to figure it out. Everything ended up working out, but it was just nuts.’ Her first long jump attempt was disqualified because of a slight foot infraction, but she soared 17’4.75” on her second try. On her final jump, she stepped over the line again, nullifying what would have been a winning jump. Even with the chaos, she finished second, just behind Carson’s Kierra Miller (17’6.75”). After finishing there, Gustafson switched shoes again and headed back to the long jump, where she came quite close to clearing the 5’6” mark, but clipped the bar on all three tries. ’I actually didn’t feel like my high jump got too comprised,’ Gustafson said. ‘The people there were really nice and accommodating ‘ but I did I feel like I was a little compromised at the long jump and I might have been able to get those two inches to get me the win. ’But that’s what happens when you do four events in one day. It comes with the territory.’ Another big win for Pali came in the boys shot put, where Iheanacho entered the favorite after posting a prelim-best mark of 52’5”. However, after the first three throws of the finals, he found himself in second, behind Jeremiah Allison of Dorsey (51’1.25”). Undeterred, Iheanacho centered himself at the break with a bit of meditation between rounds and came back to throw 51’3.75” for a hard-earned victory. ’It’s something I just picked up after spring break,’ he said of his mid-match meditation. ‘It helps me calm down, get my mind clear and really stay in the moment. I was nervous going into the final; I was there mentally, but my body wasn’t. So in the second round, I really had to dig deep and figure out how to win. My mind was focused and calm.’ Though his winning throw was about a foot shorter than his prelim mark, Iheanacho ultimately only cared about one thing: ’First place, man, that’s what it’s all about,’ he said. In addition to Iheanacho’s 10 points for his shot put win, the Dolphin boys also gained 12 points in the 3200, where three Pali runners finished in the top five: runner-up Grant Stromberg (9:30.17) with Matt Hammer and Drake Johnson fourth and fifth. Meanwhile, Dolphin senior Paul Logan, the defending high jump champion, had an up-and-down day. He earned points with his fifth-place finish in the long jump at 20’8”, but couldn’t find a rhythm in his signature event and failed to clear the bar at 5’10” in his three attempts. Malik Johnson of El Camino Real won the event with a mark of 6’4”’a mark that Logan easily cleared earlier this season. ’Any of these field events, it’s an any-given-day type thing,’ Pali coach Perry Jones said of Logan. ‘When we were at South Bay, he almost made 6’7”. Everything was right on, his steps were right, he felt really good. Today, it just wasn’t there for him.’ Logan did contribute in another way by running a leg in the team’s 4×100 relay alongside Malik McDaniel, David Joy and Arte Miura. The team earned points in the event for ‘the first time in years,’ according to Jones, by finishing fifth (42.59) behind first-place Dorsey (41.58). For the girls, the 4×100 team also scored a point with its sixth-place finish (48.99), all the more impressive considering that relay-alternate, freshman Ashley Stephens, had to run the second leg because Tyler Williams got stuck in traffic and could not compete. Gustafson also took third in the 100 hurdles (15.16) and finished second to Carson’s Dayna Hurd (44.84) in the 300 high hurdles (44.99), an event the Dolphin sophomore won last year. In addition to Gustafson, Pali senior Amber Greer also added multiple event points for the Dolphins with a sixth-place finish in the 300 hurdles (47.36) and a fifth in the triple jump (34’3.5”), while more points came via fourth-place finishes for sophomores Laura Carr in the pole vault and Doshawn Franks in the high jump. In distance, freshman McKenzie Gray finished sixth in the 800 (2:23.64), while Pali sophomore Jackie Bamberger couldn’t defend her defend her title in the 3200 and finished 14th. With dozens of top performers, the majority of whom are underclassmen, the Dolphins will look to build on this year’s strong showing for 2012. ’We have a group of girls who are young,’ Jones said, ‘and they’re only going to get faster. And with the boys, we’re almost there ‘ we’ll probably turn the corner late next year and have another good showing here. ’We’re headed in the right direction.’
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