GREENSBORO – Five minutes may not sound like a lot of time to most people, but to athletes who compete in track events, five minutes can feel like an eternity.
On Saturday, it appeared that the Raiders’ 4×100 relay team had earned Richmond Senior High School another state title to add to the numerous banners and signs around campus. Five minutes after the team began celebrating their historic accomplishment, it all went away when it was announced that the team had been tagged with an exchange infraction that disqualified them from the event.
“It’s frustrating,” said Richmond boys’ track coach Chris Campolieta after returning to RSHS following the meet. “We were definitely the fastest team, and everyone who was there knows it. They said that an exchange happened outside of the zone. I’m going to go back and look at the video to see what happened.”
During a relay, one runner will hand a baton off to a teammate while both participants are running. This handoff must occur in a 20-meter section of the track called the exchange zone. The exchange zone is identified by two triangles that are located at each end of the designated handoff area. If the handoff occurs outside of that area, the team is disqualified from the event.
The relay team consisting of Dante Miller, Preston Coker, Malik Stanback and Jaleen Baldwin only needed 41.46 seconds to complete the run at the state title meet at North Carolina A&T State University.
That time was not only the best in the event, but had it counted, it would have been the best of the season in North Carolina edging out Garner’s time of 41.53 seconds recorded at a meet earlier in the year. Instead, first-place honors went to North Mecklenburg, which finished with a time of 41.84 seconds.
Fellow Sandhills Athletic Conference schools Jack Britt (42.42 seconds) and Scotland (42.43 seconds) finished fifth and sixth, respectively, in the 4×100 relay.
The Raiders fell just short in their second attempt at a state title in the 4×200 meet. Richmond finished with an impressive time of 1:25.45, but was narrowly edged out by Ronald Reagan High School (1:26.39).
Coker also ran in the 100-meter dash. His time of 11.34 seconds in heat two of the preliminaries was not quite fast enough to earn him a spot in the finals. Baldwin finished 10th in the 200-meter dash with a time of 22.38 seconds.
The girls 4×100 relay team consisting of Harmony Jones, Maddisyn Diggs, Monasia Kearns and Jakerra Covington also competed in the state title meet. Their time of 49.84 netted them a 12th-place finish.
With that, the Richmond Senior High School track season comes to an end. Although their state title dreams came up short, both boys and girls teams put up some of Richmond Senior High School’s best times with several breaking school records.
