Congratulations to the Orchard girls' and boys' track and field teams for winning the IISL Track and Field Championships...again! To read more about Orchard's impressive winning streak, track and field coach, Justin Burris, gives you a recap of last Tuesday evening.

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For the second season in a row, our girls were behind going into the running events, as the ladies from St. Richard’s are very talented in the shot put, discus, and high jump. However, the Owls came to International School yesterday not ready to run but, instead, to race. And, let’s be honest, they showed absolutely no mercy whatsoever when the gun was fired time and time again. After just two races, our 5-point deficit had been transformed into a 6-point advantage, one that our girls would never relinquish. In fact, by meet’s end, the ladies from Orchard had annihilated the field, winning the IISL Track and Field Championship by an astounding 61 points over runner-up St. Richard’s. This would be the final tally to make the streak of championships won a decade’s worth. The girls from the Class of 2010 probably had no idea about the tradition that they would help to build and the legacy that they began to construct 10 years ago. To put it plainly, our girls squads have not lost an IISL Track and Field Championship since our fifth graders were 1-year olds.

 

On the boys’ side of things, the meet was similar in some ways but a whole lot closer. By the end of the jumping and throwing events, our guys were down to St. Richard’s by 11 points. Once the hurdles were completed, we trailed SRES by 21 and were barely ahead of Oaks by a slim margin of 3. By the time the second race had ended, we were cleanly in third place. But, then, our boys arduously began to take a stand. The next two events contained efforts that would set new school records. In the third race of the night, the 1600m, Ezra lowered his own record by 2 seconds (4:53) to bring home the blue ribbon; and in the 4 x 100m, the squad of Ian, Christopher, Ben, and Bryson torched the field with a time of 48.98. These two events shifted our boys into first place, a lead that they would give up by one point just one event later. However, after the 800m, the Owls never looked back, extending the margin of victory to 30 by meet’s conclusion, and taking home the IISL Track and Field Championship for the third year in a row and for the eighth time in ten years.