It was sometime after 4 in the afternoon, exactly 10 years ago today, that four young student-athletes from Gloucester High School stepped onto the track at the venerable old Armory building in upper Manhattan and ran their way into the history books.
The four, seniors Tristan Colangelo and Shaun Milne, and juniors Ngai Otieno and Josh Palazola, were in New York to compete in the National Scholastic Indoor Track & Field Championships, and by the time they completed their 20-lap circuit around the Armory's steeply banked, 200-meter oval, they had accomplished what no other high school runners had ever done before.
Competing in the top seeded heat of the distance medley relay (DMR), an event consisting of 1,200-, 400-, 800-, and 1,600-meter legs, not only had the boys from Gloucester finished first, they also literally obliterated the national record of 10:10.30 with an astounding, off-the-charts 9:59.94 clocking, the first and still only sub-10 minute DMR ever run indoors by a high school team anywhere in the world.
This weekend, several thousand student-athletes from schools throughout North America will be competing in one of two major high school national championships, one in Boston, the other in New York. Again, the distance medley relay will attract well more than 100 of the top teams in the country. And again, it will be interesting to see how Gloucester's record stands up to this year's assault.
Ten years have passed since those four Fishermen recorded one of the most amazing feats in the annals of high school sports, an achievement ranked by the New Balance Track & Field Hall of Fame as one of the U.S. sport's 100 best accomplishments of all time.
But what matters most isn't whether Gloucester's historic DMR record is broken this weekend or at some future time. What matters most is that the Fishermen's 2000 national champion and still national-record-holding team has provided all of us with a valuable lesson regarding the lofty heights to which young people can soar where opportunities for participation and a willingness to work hard to achieve even near-impossible goals exist.
On March 10, 2000, four young student-athletes from a relatively small but energetic and resilient public high school in a largely working-class Massachusetts coastal community took their turn on the big stage of New York City, and turned in the performance of a lifetime.
That occasion happened to involve athletes.
But the performance could just as easily have centered around music, theater, art, film-making, dance, science, engineering, or any other of the many fields of endeavor where students â€" when provided the opportunity and tools necessary to tap ever more deeply into their own developing resources â€" find it possible to discover that the sky is the limit when it comes to human achievement.
Jim Munn is a frequent contributor to the Times, and the boys track and field coach at Gloucester High School.
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
No comments:
Post a Comment