Well,
Coach Hawk and I finally were able to get into the gym today and change the CHS Track & Field Record Board. This is one of those behind-the-scenes activites that few people get to see, so I thought I would document it with the camera. Enjoy my amateur photo-journalism!
Here is Coach Hawk setting out the new records. Every year, he orders new stickers for each record broken. The ones from 2008 got delayed somehow, so we were changing records from this spring and last spring. It is important to get organized when you are on the ground, as the record board is probably 20 feet up.
This is one record we were changing, the boys 4 x 800 from 2006. Man, that was a great race, I will never forget Tyler Nabours chasing down that kid from Denver South. Awesome!
This record was also getting switched out, the girls 4 x 800 record from 2007. I think we came in fourth or fifth that year at State.
A huge delay was getting the pneumatic lift all set up, then discovering we did not have the key to start it. In fact, no one had the key, and after calling the head janitor, we realized it was lost. Grrrr... So, after a bit of a delay, we got the ladder from the drama department. That's me up on the ladder using a window scraper to scrape off the old names, records and dates of the entries we are changing.
And this is Cory (with Jeff holding the ladder securely) putting the new records up on the board.
We were thinking that next year we would enter in an official boys sprint medley, to try and get all of that blank space above the boys 4 x 800 filled up.
Coach Hawk carefully has to smooth out the sticker names on the board. They are not individual letters, but they have to be level and lined up or they look unprofessional.
Once the sticker has been smoothed out, he peels away the backing, and the blue letters stay behind.
Jeff had left by then, so I left my post of holding the ladder to get a shot of how high up Coach was.
When we are done, we have a new boys record for the 4 x 800, set at the State Meet of 2009. (On my daughter's birthday, no less!)
And finally, we have updated the girls 4 x 800 record, when they were State Champions in 2008. I think it looks great.
We also changed out the records for high jump, long jump and shot-put, you will have to go into the gym and check those out sometime.
When I first started coaching at CHS, I told Coach Hawk that my goal was to turn as many of those records onto that board from "old" records into "2005 or later" records. I was being selfish I guess, I wanted those records to go to my athletes. My name is still up on the gym wall in my high school back East, (I hope), as I got up there for State Champion and All-New Hampshire. That is what I wanted for my athletes, to be recognized based on pure athletic achievement. (Until someone else came along and broke their record, of course.) Now, in 2009, we have a lot of them, but not all them yet.
That is the beauty of track and field. It all comes down to time, or distance, or height; nothing else. Achieving All-Colorado, sometimes that comes down to "all-politics". Getting on the Wall of Champions in the athletic hallway, that is something that not only depends on your competition that year, but also on the sport you are in. We have some track kids up there, but they were state champions. In other years they might have done the exact same performance, but not have been number one in the state of Colorado. Does the fact that the competition has changed make their performance any less great? Other sports celebrate All-Colorado, All-State, or All-American. In track, it is simple. There is one winner and a bunch of non-winners. But, that record board in the gym, there is no politics, no favoritism, no discrimination, no luck. If you get the mark, you get on, nothing else matters. It all comes down to how well *you* can perform on any given day. No matter what the competition does, or what the parameters are, you can always break a record. Those are the achievements I value.
Just like I told Coach Hawk when he was up on the ladder, I was really excited when the boys won the 4 x 800 this year at State, but I was 100 times more excited that they broke the school record. No joke, breaking that record was tougher than becoming state champs, and hopefully I will have to be on that ladder again scraping off some names to put up new records next year!
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P.S. Huge thanks to Jeff, the custodian at school today who helped us out tremendously. We couldn't have done this today without his assistance!
