Home crowd fuels Trojan season bests

Aside from the 4x100 team that ran at the Drake Relays, the Fairfield boys? track team hadn?t been on a track since April 22.

Nearly two weeks.

But whether it was rest, their first chance to run in front of a home crowd or something else, improvement was apparent and the Trojans put together their ?best night of the season by far? according to head coach Brian Dunlap.

Fairfield welcomed four other teams to Trojan Stadium for the 2010 Brookhart Relays and wound up on top of three of them. Southeast Conference favorite Mount Pleasant won the 4x400 relay to distance themselves from the pack and take the team title while the host Trojans scored 89 points to take second, five points ahead of third-place Centerville.

?I was a little bit worried with the layoff we had, but up and down the lineup our kids really performed,? Dunlap said. ?It?s pretty satisfying to see and nice to beat teams like Washington and Centerville.?

Showing the most comfort being on his home track was junior Grant Curran, who did something no other Fairfield athlete had done before. He proved himself to be the best hurdler on the track winning both the Ryan Garrettson 110-meter high hurdles (15.47) and the Tom Fontana 400-meter hurdles (57.01) by less than 0.10 seconds.

The races were two of four events in honor of former Fairfield athletes ? in addition to the Dan Burnett 4x800 relay and Lee Crew 800-meter run ? with commemorative plaques going to each winner. In over 10-years of honoring the winners, Fairfield has never ended up on top.

But Tuesday, Curran took two of them.

Washington ended up winning the 4x800 and Centerville?s Logan Jellison won the 800 in 2:04.

Curran also entered into the long jump for Fairfield for one of the first times all season placing fifth with a leap of 18-feet, two-inches.

Fellow junior Michael Smithburg, fresh off his stellar finish at the Drake Relays, put in a solid throw of 161-feet even to once again easily win the discus event.

The improvement was best seen in Fairfield?s bread-and-butter events ? the sprint relays. The Trojans took off two full seconds while running third in the 4x200 (1:33.26) and blazed to another season-best in the 4x100 (44.30).

Austin Atwood ran the second leg on that 4x100 and may have looked as good as he has all season still nursing a long-lingering injury. Atwood finished second in the 100-meter dash in 11.51 with Heath Jackson right behind in third (11.71) only losing to one of the state?s best athletes in Mount Pleasant?s Darian Cotton.

From those upperclassmen who continued to prove themselves to younger guys that are trying to get there, freshman Alex Love hacked off another couple seconds off of his half-mile time. Love kicked in for third place in the 800 with a season-best time of 2:07.

Zach Vivier also impressed coaches with a second-place time of 54.84 in his first-ever open 400 ? easily a season-best for the sophomore.

?Both of those were real good runs. Considerable PR?s,? said Dunlap. ?Those are the events that we need good runs and they scored big points for us as far as the team standings go.?

Also picking up big team points was a 1-2 finish in the high jump from Daniel Schwarz (6? 1?) and Corbin Harwood (5? 10?).

The Trojans also added a relay victory in the 1600-medley as Travis Schombert dug deep down the home stretch. After taking the baton from Michael Hammes, Jackson and Lani Eversage, Schombert ousted second-place Washington at the finish by less than a second.

Fairfield will hope for more home cooking as they enter the stretch run of the season at Thursday?s Trojan Relays. The conference meet at Fort Madison will be Monday and seasons will be on the line at the district meet in Mount Pleasant next Friday.