Stroud’s Peyton Davis brought home three gold medals and broke two state records last week, headlining an impressive week for area athletes.
Davis, a junior, won the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes and the 100-meter hurdles, setting new Class 2A records in the 200 and the 100 hurdles.
Stroud brought home five individual track state championships from the Class 2A state meet at Western Heights, Dale won the Class 4A state slowpitch championship, North Rock Creek won the state academic state championship for slowpitch, NRC senior Caleb Hawkins won gold in the Class 4A long jump, Amarie Bobo from Davenport won the Class A shot put and Chandler sophomore Eli Smithey won a gold medal last week.
Davis ran 14.58 in the hurdles and 24.64 in the 200 to put her name at the top of the all-time lists. “She has a natural ability for running,” said Stroud track coach Kelly Brown. “With her work ethic, she puts in the time, perfecting her starts out of the block. She’s one in a million.”
Davis’s teammate, freshman SophieYoung came home from the meet with gold around her neck, as well. She jumped 5 feet, 4 inches to win the champions in the Class 2A high jump.
Six short weeks ago, she jumped 4 feet, 8 inches at the Tiger Classic meet in Stroud, but she improved by eight inches partly because of a coaching technique Brown employs for her high jumpers.
“The last three weeks before regionals, I set a height on the bar but don’t tell them what it is,” Brown said. “I tell ‘I think this is where you should be.’” For Young, the height before regionals was 5 feet, 4 inches. And that’s exactly what she jumped in the regional.
“She’s very coachable, understanding what she has to do,” Brown said of Young. “If she misses the first one, she knows what to do to correct it in the next jump.
“She has come a long way since the beginning of the year.”
SophomoreAiden Collins won the Class 2Along jump with a distance of 22 feet, 2.75 inches.
Hawkins picked up the gold medal in the 4A long jump with a career-best distance of 23 feet, 2.5 inches, an inch and a half better than Bayron Harrison from Miami.
The Dale Lady Pirates celebrated their annual trip to the state finals with an 11-10 come-from-behind win over Pocola in Class 4A.
The DLPs trailed, 9-2, at one point, but Heartly Snyder clubbed a walk-off home run to give Dale its eighth state championship in slowpitch.
The Lady Pirates also beat Pocola by a run in the fastpitch finals last fall.
North Rock Creek made it to the finals of the Class 5A tournament, partly because Morgan Campbell went high above the left-field wall to bring back what would have been a home run against Tecumseh with two outs in the bottom of the seventh to preserve a victory.
Although they fell in the finals to Washington, the Lady Cougars scored big when they won the academic stare champions, which goes to the team in each sport and each class with the highest cumulative grade average.
Chandler’s Smithey trailed Marlow’s Cian Durham after two throws in the Class 3A shot put, but he muscled up on his third attempt, going 53 feet, 3 inches and winning by two and a half feet.
Bobo, a junior, went 35 feet, 7 inches to win the Class A shot put, besting Jasmine Richards from Ringwood by an inch.