Preview to Track and Field

EMHS’s track and field team consists of eighteen students headed by Coach Lester Zook.  Twelve high school students, six junior high, five women, and thirteen men, all practice and attend meets together.  Every day for the past month they’ve been practicing from 3:40-5:00, getting ready for their track meets which start in just over a week. 

Track teams typically have three broad categories which they compete under; sprinters, jumpers, or distance runners.  EMHS is primarily dominated by distance runners, partially because people who ran cross country in the fall come out for track, and also because EMHS doesn’t have a football team, and, “Football teams are what produce sprinters,” said Coach Zook.

Lester Zook has been involved in track and field for about thirty years, running throughout high school, and then for Messiah college.  For the last twenty years he’s been the head cross country coach at EMU, so when EMHS’s previous track and field coach stepped down a couple years ago, Mr. Zook thought the job would be a good use of his time. 

EMHS has some good competitors on its team, including Lucas Blosser who finished 3rd in the state championship in hurdles last year, and Matt Layman, who’s working on a sub-5 minute mile. 

There are a various reasons kids enjoy the track team, whether it’s because they have the goal of beating their personal record on an event, or because they like the social aspect of it.  Lucas Blosser says it’s partially because, “Most of my friends are distance runners.” 

It seems, “A lot of people tend not to do track because they’ve only known running as a punishment, because in other sports, coaches make them run if they’re bad,” said Brook Hostetter who runs the mile for the Varsity team, “they look at running as a bad thing.”  She says that once you actually run because you decide to, “It’s really fun, and makes you feel good about yourself."

- Eric Broderson

Comments

[James Souder]

A well-written article--thanks, Eric!