District Track...

Thursday was the District 5-3A track meet at Wylie. The great part about shooting this meet for me is there are no losers. Given that all of our Class 3A schools are in this district no matter who wins, it's either a local or an area kid that is winning the meet. It was good to have this meet back in Abilene again, since it's always fun to cover and the past few years while it's been in the other area towns we haven't covered it, so I was happy to see it back in Abilene.

Last year, for the first time in 16 years the Wylie boys didn't win a district title in track. This year the boys came back and with a vengeance. And speeding ahead of the pack, literally was Wylie sprinter Devan Brown. With the strong winds on Thursday and Brown's smokin fast speed already it was pretty obvious that the 100m dash was going to be a very fast event. Brown didn't disappoint. He literally blew past the field even without a great start he blazed down the track to win the race with a time of 10.29, easily beating a pretty fast field.

For the last 21 years the Wylie girls have brought home a district track title. To put that into perspective, the last time the Wylie girls team didn't win a district championship was at least three years before any of the participants in the meet were even born. Last year the girls were able to squeeze out a win over an incredibly fast Big Spring team. This year though, it wasn't in the cards and Big Spring finally dethroned Wylie, but not without a fight.

There are goods and bads about shooting district track. The access is about as good as it can be. Outside of standing on the track during the race I can pretty much have the run of things and the coaches are happy to have you there, so they're all very helpful. It allowed me to set up a remote almost right next to the track (I id make sure that it was far enough away that if someone fell they weren't landing on my remote, for both the safety of the runner and my camera). Now, the bad parts... usually going into the meets you know who is going to win. There isn't the vast pool of talent you'll find at regionals and there's nothing close to what you'll find at state, so the emotion of winning just isn't really there since you won't see a lot of upsets and the winners are kind of expecting to win. But, it's really just the start of the track season for me and, overall, I was happy with the action I got. Hopefully it'll get better from here and I know the emotion will come over the next few weeks at regionals and state.