Too Close to Call

By etrain11

District 2 AAA may have been the greatest district championship I've ever seen. Period. Full stop. Don't @ me bro. But actually, feel free, our twitter is the opposite of a fire emoji these days.

Here's the thing: every single distance race was incredibly close. Razor thin margins. And, yes, the times weren't as fast as what it will likely take to win any of the big 3 districts, but these times were still fantastic, especially for one of the smaller districts in the state. 

Let's start with the 4x8 where Dallas, the XC powerhouse, punched their ticket to states with an 8:10.88. But just behind them, Wallenpaupack ran 8:10.93 for 2nd. Since I believe D2 only sends one individual automatically, only Dallas got the state spot. But Walle motored back to make it interesting behind a 1:53 anchor leg from super soph Tyler Wirth. That's a name you need to know track fans. Yes that's 1:53 for a 0.05 difference in the final standings. Wild.

Shortly after that 4x8 Wirth had to double back for the 1600 where a pair of Abington Heights boys were waiting for him. This one was the biggest blow out of the day on the distance side, being decided by an entire 0.45 seconds. Wirth took a small lead early with Kyle Burke and Dan Uhranowsky trailed him. Then it was an all out sprint on the final lap. Burke took things done with a 60 second final lap and a time of 4:22 to just edge out Wirth, who still managed a 4:22 in his own right. Uhranowsky took a well earned 3rd in 4:23.62 meaning all 3 guys punched tickets for states. There, Wirth will baffle the Abington Heights boys with fresh legs which could make him an X factor. He ran 4:19 the last time he was at Ship. Burke and Uhranowsky are both juniors by the way so they will run this back next year.

Ok back to the close races. In the 800, it was another one spot affair and with no one running the SQS, a state birth was only going to one runner. North Pocono's Ryan Bocan dug deep with everything he had and just barely edged out Mitchell Forgash of Wyoming Valley to get the gold 1:58.49 to 1:58.51. Just 0.02 seconds. So, in total, 3 distance races adding up to 5600 meters have been decided by 0.52 seconds.

The lottery is rigged. What? Who said that? Not me. Ok cool.

To cap things off, the longest event of the day hit the track. Here, David Haines was the main attraction. Haines, a top 20 Regional finisher in XC, has been slowing building up during this outdoor season and hopes to follow in the footsteps of last year's state champ Matt Kravitz, another underrated North Pocono stand out. But Kravitz's former teammate got all he could handle on race day from Junior Jack Zardecki of Dallas. The top 2 finishers from districts in XC dueled all the way to the line and each clocked times of 9:22, Haines holding off the youngster by 0.23. 

Zardecki ran solid at Henderson's meet, but this result really puts him at another tier. Low 9:20s puts you in the medal conversation for sure. And Haines needed a time like this as well. He's been running great marks, but a high quality win like this makes the Haines-Kravitz comparison a little bit more reasonable. It's no longer just: well, they went to the same school so doesn't that mean they will do the same thing? Both these guys are very good and there's not a ton of guys who are clearly superior to them on paper (for now). Excited to see both guys get state tickets. 

That's now 8800 meters of racing decided by 0.75 seconds? That's like a quarter of the time it took you to check if my math was wrong (it probably is). That's like the amount of grammatical errors I make per sentence when typing posts on my phone. That's like as long as it took you to figure out the Warriors and the Cavs were going to play in the finals this year. That's like the amount on a scale of 1 to 10 that people give for how good I am at coming up with lists of things for a given situation. 

Basically, shout out to District 2 and hope all you fans who watched the meet had fun.