Girls 3,200 squad also turns in season-best performance

Posted Saturday, April 1, 2006, The OG, sports

Two Uni relay teams ran their best times of the season Friday night at the Illinois Prep Top Times Indoor Classic, the unofficial state indoor championships. The Class A meet was held at the University of Illinois Armory.

The boys 4x800-meter team of seniors Kangway Chuang and Cameron Cropek, freshman Malcolm Taylor, and sophomore Austin Rundus placed fourth among the 12 state-qualifying teams with an official time of 8 minutes, 25.27 seconds. The Uni squad was only 0.01 seconds away from a third-place tie with Rochester, which clocked in at 8:25.26.

Monticello won the event with a time of 8:00.15, followed by Sparta at 8:16.97.

Individually, Chuang turned in a time of 2:06.5, Cropek ran 2:05.07, Taylor 2:07.4, and Rundus 2:05.4.

The performance was by far the boys' strongest of the indoor season, beating their previous best time by 20 seconds. (They ran 8:45.20 to qualify for the Indoor Classic.)

Meanwhile, the girls 4x800 team also turned in its fastest time of the year en route to a ninth-place finish out of 16 qualifying teams.

Sophomore Shivani Khanna, freshman Elaine Gu, senior Josie Chambers, and freshman Laura Hazlett ran an unofficial time of 10:29.12. (The result is unofficial, according to head coach Doug Mynatt, because the fully automated timing system did not function properly for this race.)

Eureka won the event with a time of 9:46.7.

Individually, Khanna clocked in at 2:34.3, Gu ran 2:39.5, Chambers 2:36.8, and Hazlett 2:38.9.

Overall, the performance was the team's fastest of the season by seven seconds. (The girls ran 10:36.39 to qualify for the Indoor Classic.)

“It was really exciting and a great experience for both our guys and girls 4x800 relays to run with the best A schools in the state,” Chambers said. “The intensity was really high, and both relays really stepped it up. Both relays ran only seconds away from outdoor state-qualifying times tonight, meaning prospects for [outdoor] state are looking very good.

“The entire team has worked really hard this year and kept a great attitude. I think that the recent successes of our two distance relays are just two good examples of that.”

— Gargoyle staff

[Note: The Online Gargoyle thanks coach Doug Mynatt for supplying us with the information used in this story. Co-editor Annie Fehrenbacher gathered the quotes from Josie Chambers.]