ECS Track Teams Looking For Championships in 2023
ECS Track Teams Looking for Championships in 2023
Both Boys and Girls Track Teams are Having a Magnificent Outdoor Season
Photos / Rich Rumfola
Looking at the calendar, you’d think high school spring sports have just begun, but if you look at the schedule for the Franklinville-Ellicottville Titans Track and Field teams, half of the 2023 outdoor season is now water under the bridge, and the biggest and most-anticipated meets will come in the next few weeks.
Having won back-to-back Section VI Class D championships in the past two seasons, the Titans girls and boys teams are both poised once again to boast the best track and field athletes in all of Western New York.
Last Saturday, Olean High School played host to the first big meet of the season for many of the area’s schools, and the defending champion F-E Titans posted enough strong finishes to once again find themselves near the top of the team scoring leaderboard, with the girls team bringing home a second place finish, while the boys team captured fourth place among the 17 ‘small’ schools that competed.
Having capped off a magnificent outdoor season in 2022 with a sixth place finish in the 400m dash at the State Championships, senior sprinter Tyyetta Herman led the scoring for both teams at Olean, as she picked up right where she left off and dusted the field in the 100m and 200m sprints. Herman also placed second in the long jump and finished the 400m dash in second place, trailing only Allegany-Limestone’s Angelina Napoleon, who set new meet and track records with her dominant performance in the 400m dash.
“We’re strong in everything,” explained Titans Girls Coach Tyyetta Herman (yes, she has the same name as her speedy daughter). “We’re strong in the sprints, we’re strong in the distance events and we have Libby Price who has qualified for sectionals and took second in the discus with a personal record throw of just over 100 feet.”
Quite happy with the progress she’s made thus far from a recent knee surgery, Price also brought home a 9th-place finish in the shot put.
Herman explained that a number of her girls have already posted times/distances that are either better than (or close to) their top marks from last season, but with more than three weeks before all the most important competitions begin, the girls coach is confident there is still plenty of time for her athletes to get stronger and to build on the great start they’ve already had.
Hurdler Anna Slavinski also brought home some impressive results from Olean, as the fleet-footed senior demolished the competition in the 400m hurdles, where the second-place finisher crossed the line 2.5 seconds behind her. Slavinski also finished ninth in the 200m dash and quite impressively, placed second in the pole vault with the temperature dropping and a steady rain falling in the late afternoon at Olean. By the time they ran the final attempts in the pole vault pit, Slavinski and teammates had been on site for more than seven hours and most of the other competitors had finished for the day.
Senior distance runner Alysa Williams took 8th place in the 800m competition, 13th place in the 1,500m run and in an event that featured the current national record holder for all women under 20 years of age (Angelina Napoleon, from Allegany), Williams finished the 2,000m steeplechase in third place.
As the Titans graduated a number of the stronger athletes from last year’s boys championship squad, coach Derek Schunke’s team was paced at the Olean meet by a strong contingent of some of the youngest members of the team, like sophomore hurdler Ben Edwards, who took 4th place in the 110m high hurdles and 3rd place in the 400m hurdles.
“We lost quite a few seniors from the boys team,” Schunke said. “We’re also down in terms of the number of boys we had come out this year, as opposed to in the past, but our main focus is to get better each year and I’m hopeful we’ll be in the positive column with wins over losses when we get to the end of the season.”
Continuing on with the youth theme at Olean, freshman distance runner Grant Cornell claimed 4th place in the 3000m steeplechase and 6th place in the two-mile run, while sophomore Billy Slavinski brought home a 4th-place finish in the shot put. Senior weight man Tyler Gibas earned a top-nine finish in the shot put and a top-25 finish in the discus. Also a senior, Dominic Breton tossed the discus just a tad under 100 feet, which was good enough for 13th place and he claimed a pair of top-20 finishes in the long jump and triple jump.
At the beginning of each new season, coaches and athletes are provided with a “provisional times list,” which gives the minimum times and distances that will qualify an athlete to compete in the Section VI championships in each event. However, only the top 16 times/distances in each event will move on to the sectionals, which means even if an athlete achieves the provisional time, they would still have to post a result in the top-16 to move on. The other way to qualify for sectional competition would be to beat the provisional time/distance by a certain margin and therefore achieve an “automatic qualifier” status for that event.
An impressive number of Titans athletes from both the boys and girls squads have achieved either provisional or automatic qualifiers already this season.
With the exception of the relay events (which feature four-person teams competing against one another), track and field seems to be the ultimate individual sport, but don’t tell that to either of Titans head coaches - they’ll be quick to point out that every individual accomplishment goes to lift the entire team.
“Sometimes you’re going to run events that you don’t want to run,” Herman said. “But it’s not just about yourself, it’s about the team.”
“You get a score when you finish at the top of an event,” Schunke said. “You get five points for first and three for second and one for third and all those points contribute to a team score - and ultimately, they’ll determine which team wins or loses.”
He also went on to explain the strategy behind entering athletes into events where they’re likely to achieve the results that will help the entire team win. “Ideally that’s what you’re building toward through the whole season. It’s the team wins first and then with sectionals, it comes down to individual performances to move on.”
Moving on from Olean, the Titans will travel over the hill to the Allegany-Limestone high school Friday, April 28 for the Allegany Invitational. The first gun goes off at 4:30pm.