On Thursday and Friday, Westfield traveled to Governor Livingston for the Union County Conference Meet. Head coach Christopher Tafelski said, “We used the conference meet to tune up a bit and get some seed times we need to get into the fast heats in the sectional meet.” And the Blue Devils did just that. Placing second in the meet, Westfield had strong performances in both track and field events. Events that took place on Thursday had nice, warm spring weather while Friday saw wet conditions due to rain. However, the rain did not prevent Westfield from setting new personal best marks and placing high in events.
Senior Graham Korins ran 9:50.39 in the 3200, which secured him second place. In the 1600, junior Ryan Daly and seniors Eamon Mason and Tage Mehta placed first, second and third, respectively, with times of 4:21.44, 4:21.88 and 4:23.58. Junior Emmanuel Gayanilo placed second in the 400 with a time of 49.74 seconds.
In the 800, seniors Alex Valencia and Jimmy Gildea placed first and third with times of 1:55.59 and 1:59.23, respectively. The 4 x 400 relay of Gildea, Valencia, Tyler Pietrewicz and Kaleb Stoeckmann placed second with a time of 3:31.40.
As for the field events, the Blue Devils put together strong marks in many different areas. Junior Niko Lukis placed third in the high jump with a personal-best 6-foot jump. In the pole vault, Andrew Geocos set a personal-best mark of 10′ 6″.
The throwers kept this strong streak going. Junior Noah Rubenstein threw 126′ 7″ in the discus to place fourth. In the shot put, Rubenstein and junior Max Reissman threw 46′ 2″ and 44′ 10″ to place fifth and sixth. The javelin event, Westfield’s best throwing event, saw first, third and sixth place finishes from seniors Max Cho and Jeremy Cruz and junior Lincoln Meyers. They threw 156′ 9″, 152′ 3″ and 143′ 5″, respectively.
The javelin squad is consistently seeded high in the event and usually throws high-placing marks. “All three of us are expected to place high in our heat, so sometimes it just comes down to which one of us will beat the other two,” said Cho. “You never know who is going to throw the farthest on any given day, so we like to compete against each other along with against other teams.”
“Our focus is entirely on the State Sectional and Group Championship meets,” said Tafelski. “Our field squad is coming along nicely, so when we put it all together at Sectionals we’ll be ready to show that we are a factor at the state level
