STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - The Jamestown indoor track teams competed in the Kevin Dare Invitational at Penn State on Saturday.
"The level of competition at this meet is on par with the New York State championships, so we don't come here to win events," said JHS assistant coach Ron Graham. "We come here to compete and break school records."
Several JHS records did fall, including the boys 800-meter relay record of 1:36.91 set last year at the same meet by Taylor Bennett, David Morse, Dylan Gaeta and Justin Capuano. This year, the team bettered it by more than a second with their 1:35.38 performance, which was good for 10th place out of 34 teams. The new record holders are Justin Capuano, Michael Watson, Mitchell Moore and Da'Quan Hollingsworth.
The meet has races of slightly different distances than those normally run in New York, so many other school records tumbled.
Mitchell Moore (9.28) and Cienna Simon (9.19) broke the school records in the boys and girls 60-meter hurdles with Simon taking seventh place overall.
Moore also went on to better the open 400 (51.88), taking 10th place.
Patrick Walsh (2:09.51) and Kimberly Lindquist (2:35.37) bettered the school marks in the open 800 and Hollingsworth (7.27) took down the 60 meter record.
Other notable finishes for the Red Raiders included Olivia Zabrodsky with a seventh in the 3,000 (11:12.98). The girls 800 relay of Sarah Garvin, Simon, Summer Haight, and Kylie Wilson took 12th in 1:51.60, for the second-fastest time in JHS history.
Brielle Edborg took ninth in the high jump with her leap of 4-foot-9 while teammate Mikayla Capestrani took 10th place in the pole vault with a height of 9 feet.
Perhaps the coach's delight of the day came with the performances turned in by Jamestown's two middle school athletes. Jefferson eighth-grader Sarah Garvin ran an outstanding 400 meters (1:02.88) to move her into third place on the all-time indoor 400-meter list.
Washington seventh-grader, Orianne Simon, who turned out to be the only seventh-grader entered in the meet, finished 35th out of 65 entrants in the 60 meters in a time of 8.64, placing her fifth on the JHS all-time list.