BRIGHTON — Adults, throughout history, have complained that teenagers are lazy, or lack motivation, or don’t have heart.
They never met the Brighton girls track team.
There’s Cassidy Newberg, who couldn’t figure out why her times stayed flat despite what she thought were shin splints last season.
Then she found out she had been running on a left tibia that had not one, but two stress fractures, one of them a spiral fracture.
Or there’s Erin Dowd, who was seeded second in the state in the 100 hurdles and flopped. Literally.
“I fell twice and finished next to last,” she said. But she regrouped and is one of the best hurdlers in the state going into Saturday’s Division 1 state meet at Hudsonville.
Here’s a list of Division 1 qualifiers:
Here is a list of Division 2 qualifiers:
Dowd already has a school record in the 300, and her coach, Gera Gee, expects her to break the 100 mark on Saturday.
“It’s my record, and she’s going to get it,” Gee said Friday before the team left for Hudsonville. “She’s so much better than I was, works so much harder and is so much more deserving. She’s made me wait until the very last meet of the season, but she’ll do it.”
It’s a group, Gee says, that has determined individuals who could take home multiple all-state honors.
“Every single one of them has a chance,” she said. “We’ve never said that before. These girls are amazing.
“I’m more nervous now than i’ve ever been for a group of girls, and I can’t figure it out,” she said. “Why am I so worked up for them? But you want it so much for them, and they want it so much. This is a group of girls who gave up other sports for track and field, and they have worked year-round and have done everything they needed to do, and you want that to be rewarded.”
The team also includes Jenna Sica, a key for the state champion ski team two years ago and a top performer in the distances who was named the school’s athlete of the year on Thursday.
Gee doesn’t see her team competing for the team title (“When you have teams like Oak Park and (East) Kentwood that are so deep and have multiple people in multiple events, that didn’t become our focus.”) but has utmost confidence in them as individuals.
“It’s more likely that we wouldn’t have someone go (all-state) than we do have someone to go,” she said. “They’re ready, they’re rested, they’ve prepared, they’ve worked like little dogs all season long, and this is what the payoff is. … I’m so excited for them, and I want to see their hard work pay off.”
Dowd says confidence and the memory of last year’s race have been keys this season.
‘I have a lot more races under my belt,” she said. “I was fairly inexperienced last year, even though, I guess, I was good. But now I’m a lot more confident, and in my team there’s a strong connections between us all.”
Newberg, who admits to lingering trepidation (“Every little pain is a little scary,” she said), has dropped 2 1/2 seconds from her time in the 400 meters this year and hopes to drop another second on Saturday, and expects big performances from here teammates.
“Everyone works so hard, and they leave it on the track,” she said. “I think we’ll do good things.”
