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3rd Straight Outdoor CHSAA Championship!

5/24 - 77th CHSAA Championship - Mt. St. Michael Academy

3-Peat! The Story....(chapters to be added as time permits)

Back by popular demand (see the 2001 story), the blow-by-blow story of the 2003 CHSAA Outdoor Championship........with a little help from a close friend of Prep Track & Field.

Prologue I: Intrigue at the Seeding Meeting
The CHSAA Championship meet is "seeded" by coaches at a seeding meeting 3 days before the meet.  Coaches must submit races and seeds for every athlete that has a reasonnable chance to score.  Once the seeds are submitted, they are read publicly and coaches have a chance to challenge the seeds of opposing runners.  The object is to create the best fields for each race.  In the pre-internet days, these meetings were often raucous affairs.  Without iron-clad methods of verifiing times run by each runner, coaches often engaged in "creative" seeding, and accusation of the same were tossed about with reckless abandon.    We could go into some of the famous quotes recalled by your truly, but fordhamprep.org censors would not be pleased.    Still, in recent years, the seeding meetings had become quite tame, much to the chagrin of some old-time coaches.  The internet blocked most avenues of time/mark manipulation, and challenges became less frequent.  We had every reason to believe the same would be true of this meeting. 

But no.  Once coaches submit their seeds, the cards are readaloud by Xaverian Coach Frank McCartney--a tradition at least 25 years old.  When the 2nd even was called, the St. Anthony's coach noted his 2 athletes, both of whom would have been seeded among the top four, were not read.  The meeting stopped briefly to look for the cards which were not found. Discussion ensued, ending with the controversial decision that the athletes, apparently but certainly unintentionally not entered, would not be allowed to compete for medals or points in the meet.  Cards were spotted (ironically by Coach Febles) on the floor after the meeting ended about an hour after the incident.  But without calling their authenticity into question (which some coaches did privately), it was determined the meeting was over and nothing would change.  The argument would carry over into the meet 3 days later, but with no satisfacion for St. Anthony's.  Oddly enough, St. Anthony's had also entered 2 athletes 3 times...a clear violation of the meet's 20 year-old 2-event limit.  So their day did not begin well.  

Prologue II: Adversity....Again
2002-2003 had been a dream year for Fordham Prep Track...National Indoor Relay Champions, Indoor City Champions, Millrose Champions, etc.  But there had been an element of the dramatic nearly every step of the way.  Pneumonic Conrad struggling at Millrose and heroic Brian McCabe stirring the crowd; Conrad returning to glory at Penn only to be overshadowed by  "the Northport incident"; and now, the Cities.     Indoors, we got to the City Champs banged up and under the weather, but still managed to take the victory.  Now, inexplicably, we were in a similar situation.  While one could look at our City titles over the past 2 years and call them "easy", none of the wins have been so.  Serious challenges have been thrown in our way every time, and this meet proved to be, arguably, the most trying of all. 

The "DL" as we entered the meet: 4-Time CHSAA Pole Vault Champion Gavin McMahon would miss the meet due to a freak accident at the previous week's sectionals that left him with 16 stitches near his knee.  2-Time City Champion Conrad Dalton, heavy favorite in the 400m and high jump, strained his hamstring in the cold weather 2 weeks earlier at the Loucks Games.  He was questionable.  Ricky Schramm, who starred indoors and competed at the previous week's sectional Champs after tennis had finished, would not be able to make the meet. 

In addition, teams such as Chaminade, St. Anthony's, Mount St. Michael and Farrell (the latter two teams had beaten the Prep at the previous week's Sectional Championships) had shown vast improvement over the course of the spring and were poised to knock off the Rams.  Clearly each team saw a golden opportunity in front of them.  But so did the Rams.

The Best Laid Plans....Upended!
The forecast all week was gloomy.   The predictions held true as Saturday May 24^th dawned a rainy day.  The weather, 50 degrees, with steady rain and wind,  was typical of this, one of the nastiest spring in recent memory.  And it would certainly come into play.  The day’s events were not a minute old when the meet's prospects would suffer a sudden jolt.  As Jose Fernandez was dominating the field with an insurmountable lead in the 400 IH, disaster struck as he slipped over the ninth of ten hurdles.  Greg Sans, in second at the moment, allowed himself to get distracted by the shocking sight of Jose on the ground and yelled "get up!", but in doing so allowed the revenge-motivated Chris Bier of Chaminade (defeated by Greg at last year's City Championship), to nip him by mere inches at the finish.   Jose courageously rose from his fall and garnered a valuable point for 5^th place, but in all this was a wide open door through which Chaminade was cetrtainly prepared to charge through. 

Sophomore Edwin Rodriguez would later say that he was "scared" of Coach Febles at that moment based on his verbal reaction to the aforementioned events.  Coach Febles maintains that any such use of expletives was done in the calmest, kindest and most tasteful of manners. 

Chaminade 9, Fordham 5, St. Anthony's 3

More to come.......