News for the Week of March 28th

Happy Easter everyone! If you're in town, we have practice this week and a meet on Saturday.

• Tuesday practice at Pleasant Hill Middle School, 5-6:30pm
• Thursday practice at College Park, 5-6:30pm
• Relay meet at Ygnacio Valley High on Saturday

Mary Chatterton Memorial Relay Meet, Saturday at YVHS

• Athletes and Coaches should arrive: 9:00am

Remember if you are signed up to volunteer at the meet and you intend to hire a YVHS student to sub for you, you need to bring me a check for $50 at practice this week. Make it out to Ygnacio Valley High School Athletic Boosters.

The relay meet is special. We have four events only this week, and they're all relays, with no individual races and no field events.

Event order is:

• 4x100m - the same relay we know and love from practice meets
• Medley - double our normal sprint medley, the distances are 200m, 200m, 400m, and 800m
• 4x200m - another doubling, every athlete runs 1/2 lap
• 4x400m - our usual and the final event of the day

Despite there being only four events, the overall meet length is about the same, owing to the general chaos of staging.

We will still run girls in an event first, and then boys, with an eye toward filling all lanes in the track for each race.

There are no limits to the number of races an athlete may be in this week. Opportunists might even be able to run in the same event twice.

Free Agency

At this meet, there is usually a special "Free Agent" loitering area set up for athletes in search of a relay team. Coaches are urged to look there to round out relay teams.

This means we'll see multi-age and -parish teams this Saturday. It's all good, and it's all for fun. The only two rules for relay teams are:

• Girls' teams must be all girls: co-ed teams count as a boys' team
• Teams run as the grade of their oldest athlete

If it happens that we have four kids in the Free Agent area, they will be instantly transformed into an impromptu relay team and put out on the track. This is always quite a spectacle.

Awards and Results

I have ribbons from meet 2 ready to hand out at practice this week. Personal best results from the first two meets have been assembled and will be converted to ribbons soon. This year, to make the result compilation more automated, I've made the executive decision that, contrary to past practice, the first time an athlete does an event, that constitutes a personal best and gets a ribbon!

See you on the track!