Coming off a 13th place team finish in the State Championship last season, the girls track team is looking to bounce back with a roster of predominantly underclassmen.
Head coach Joshua Washington is entering his ninth season coaching track, his fifth being a head coach for the girls team. He said he has learned new strategies after coaching year after year, which he believes will help the team.
“One of the most exciting things about coaching is that you get to learn something new every day,” Washington said. “Over the years I’ve gone to many coaching clinics, I’ve read a lot of books, studied a lot of really good athletes and I’ve learned a lot. The more that I learned, the better coach that I’m able to be and the more, the better coach I’m able to be, the better my athletes are.”
Despite the loss of some major athletes due to graduation or transferring, Washington said the variety of the team will help them succeed.
“We lost quite a few distance members last year,” Washington said. “We also had a couple of transfers, and we were counting on them. The good thing is that we have really good depth on our team and we have a lot of good individual athletes who are ready to step up and fill that void. So a couple of big losses, but we don’t dwell on those, we just focus on who we have in front of us.”
Junior Cate Barton, who runs the 800 and the 4×800, said the loss of Emilia Weinrobe, Sarah Prevost and Jamie Marlowe will greatly impact the team.
“Losing Emilia, Sarah and Jamie to graduation is a major loss because they had been such steady and consistent members of the team,” Barton said. “The distance group hasn’t had a lot of depth in the past, and so losing them is definitely tough, but I think we have some promise in the underclassmen coming into the team.”
Junior captain Grace Lisbon, who runs the 400, the 4×400, the 200 and the 4×100, as well as competing in the high jump, said the sprinters lost a major contributor, Danayja Harper, so the underclassmen will be valuable for replacing the team’s lost talent.
“Last year, we had the number one sprinter for the 100m hurdles and the 300m hurdles, but we have a lot of new young talent, so I think we will be okay,” Lisbon said.
Washington said the conditioning sessions the team had been doing previous to tryouts will be helpful to the athletes in preparation for the upcoming season.
“We had a really good conditioning period,” Washington said. “This was the first conditioning period where we were consistent with the things that we were doing, like we were consistently lifting weights, we were consistently doing plyometrics, we were consistently building our aerobic capacity and that was just preseason.”
Lisbon said the expectations for last season were not met, so her goal this year is to jump higher than before and get a personal record in a couple events.
“The team didn’t do as well as we were expected to do, we only had three athletes and a relay team make it to state, which was significantly less than the year before,” Lisbon said. “My goal for myself is to place in state in high jump, and I also want to get a new PR in the 400. I expect us to have a 4×400 team compete at State, and my fellow high jumper Amelia [last name] to also compete in State. I also think we might have a solid 4×200 that may be able to compete at State.”
Washington said his goal is to become a championship coach and have a team that is able to win as many competitions as possible.
“At the current moment, I am not a championship coach; we’ve never won a championship,” Washington said. “We’ve won plenty of meets and we’ve had plenty of success at our smaller Tuesday meets, but I haven’t won the Atlanta Track Classic yet and I’m not a region champion yet. We are working each day so that we are prepared to be region champions and city champions as well.”
