Bruins’ ‘back-ups’ do the job in Neuse 6 championships

With senior jumper Asun Pender and junior distance runner Rebecca Balkcum out while nursing injuries in Wednesday’s 2-A Neuse 6 Conference track and field championship meet for host Beddingfield, some previously unsung competitors stepped up to make a difference for the Bruins.

Freshman Traona McCoy won the girls high jump in her first time competing in the event to go along with a first place in the girls 300-meter hurdles to help Beddingfield finish second overall in the girls team competition. Junior Ivy Dawson filled in for Pender by winning the triple jump and taking second in the long jump while junior Jhion McGhee won high jump and was second in 110 hurdles for the Bruins as they finished third in the six-team meet.

Senior Nolan Gamwell also won the boys 1,600 and 3,200 runs while Kamryn Knight ruled the girls triple jump for the Bruins. Beddingfield posted 88 points in the girls meet, second only to Eastern Wayne with 167, while the Bruin boys were third with 80 points behind Eastern Wayne (156) and North Johnston (97).

Beddingfield head coach Ben Ellis expected Knight and fellow senior Starkashia Anderson to produce points Wednesday and they did. Anderson was fourth in the girls 100 dash and fifth in the 200 while Knight, in addition to winning the girls triple jump with a leap of 29 feet, 8 inches, was sixth in long jump and the 100 dash.

McCoy, who also was on Beddingfield’s 4×100 and 4×200 relay teams, found herself in the high jump for the first time.

“When you’re a freshman you kind of just try out different things,” Ellis said. “Throughout the year we’ve kind of thrown her in some things that she’s done well in pretty much everything she’s done. Actually I think it was last week at practice, we just kind of discovered that she could high jump and she started doing it. It was funny, you know, several weeks before we kind of had all the girls try high jump and let’s just see who could do it and I don’t know where she was that day. We just joked about it. So she ended up doing it and winning the event yesterday.”

Ellis said that McCoy had hit 4-7 during practice but she cleared 4-8 to win, She ran a winning time of 52.36 in the 300 hurdles.

Ellis pointed to junior Dominique Mirville as another athlete who stepped up for Beddingfield as she finished second behind Knight in the triple jump without much prior experience.

“It was one of the things where we saw an opportunity to maybe stick another girl in there to see if she could do it and she went out there and ended up getting second place,” he said. “So that’s just another one that I was very proud of doing something different and ended up doing really well.”

Freshman Caroline Aycock placed second in the girls 800 and sixth in long jump while Beddingfield was the runner-up in girls 4×100 relay.

Not having Pender. the Bruins’ only automatic NCHSAA 2-A East Regional qualifier, in Wednesday’s conference meet was potentially devastating. The senior multi-sport athlete is one of the top jumpers in the NCHSAA 2-A East and entered the Neuse 6 championships as the top seed in triple and long jumps and No. 2 in high jump.

Thanks to Dawson and Ashby, Pender’s absence wasn’t felt nearly as sharply. Dawson, who had the third-best seed distance at 41-3.5 in triple jump, only needed to go 38-11 to win. He matched Princeton’s Timothy Campbell in the long jump at 19-0 but Campbell did it first to win the event.

It’s been a steady progression from his sophomore year when he didn’t really compete much to conference champ for Dawson, Ellis said. Even at the beginning of the season, Ellis said Dawson was still trying to find his niche but started getting positive results in the jumps behind Pender.

“I knew what he did (Wednesday) he could do, because he’s kind of shown that in the last month or so,” Ellis said.

Ashby entered as the No. 3 seed in high jump behind Eastern Wayne sophomore Jeremiah Faison and Pender. Ashby hit his seed height of 5-8 and that was enough to topple Faison, who needed more jumps to clear that height.

Faison got one back from Ashby in the 110 hurdles when the Bruins junior was second in 19.06, well off Faison’s winning pace of 15.48.

Gamwell, however, had the best day for the Bruins as he won the 1,600 and 3,200 and took third in the 800. Gamwell entered as the top seed in the 3,200 at 10:30 and didn’t come close to that but still won easily with a time of 10:57, more than six seconds ahead of North Johnston’s Geno Zenobi and Brayden Cunningham. Gamwell was the second seed in the 1,600 behind Spring Creek’s James Cabrera but the Bruins senior forged ahead midway through the race and won convincingly with a time of 4:47 in his first race of the day. That was just off his season-best time of 4:45.56 but well ahead of Cabrera in second at 4:56. Gamwell was third behind winner Mudian Mustafa of North Johnston and Cabrera in the 800.

Mustafa and Brian Jones in the 400 were the only individual winners for the runner-up North Johnston boys, who also won the 4×400 and 4×800 relays and took second in the 4×200 relay.

Nearly all of the points for the North Johnston girls came from Haley Epps and Samantha Boswell, who won five events between them. Epps won the 800 in 2:55, took first in the 1,600 in 6:21 and breezed to victory in the 3,200 in 13:37. Boswell won discus with a 92-3 toss and took first in shot put with a 29-5 heave.

Next up is the NCHSAA 2-A East Regional meet at Kinston on Friday, May 10. Ellis hopes that Pender has rested his ankles enough to compete for a shot at moving on to the state 2-A championship meet the following week in Greensboro. The Beddingfield coach is unsure of Balkcum’s status after she injured a knee playing soccer for the Bruins. However, Ellis believes that several more of his athletes will qualify for the regional meet.

“I think we’ll probably take three or four boys and then several girls,” he said.

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