There are three meets in my elementary school’s track season. First, the Divisional meet, then Regionals, then the City Finals. Last year we had one relay team and a couple of field athletes go to the city meet, and this year we were hoping to send a few more people.
The first meet went OK. Most of our relay teams got through their heat in the top 4 and made the finals, with the exception of our dreadful grade 3 girls team. Unfortunately, our grade 3 boys, grade 4 girls, and grade 5 and 6 girls teams did not come top 2 in the finals, thus they were eliminated. Even my two time city finalist grade 6 team came second in their final, and their exchanges looked a little rusty- this is usually our major strength, as we have no standout 100m speed king, but these kids gain massive time by destroying everyone in the exchange zone.
Basically, after the first meet I have to say that the key problem with this year’s work is that there were not nearly enough high speed baton exchanges. We only got to complete one or two practises that included full speed exchanges. Usually, I’ll set students up on the back stretch at 30m spacings. This allows us to get a lot of reps in (6-8 in total) at high speed, and we usually run it in both directions. (After this, I’ll take students in grades 5 to 8 for a few longer reps, but 6-8x 30m is usually enough for the little ones, especially because it’s preceded by a warmup, drills, and some 10’s, 20’s, and 30’s lying face down, pushup position, etc.)
For example, we run 4x30m exchanges. Once the baton reaches the anchor, students turn around to face opposite direction, and the anchor becomes first runner, 3rd becomes 2nd, 2nd becomes 3rd, 1st becomes anchor. Students now receive baton in their other hand. This means if needed they can run in any spot on the relay with equal effectiveness. (It also eliminates the need to run batons from the finish back to the start)
This is the workout that got our exchanges to be far more efficient than those of other schools, allowing even our mediocre teams to advance to finals at least at the divisional level. This year, we only got through this workout once or twice, while last year it was done many more times.
Overall we had a number of very good individual performances. We had our twins from the 4x100 relay clean up in the 400 and 1500, where they smashed the field. Also, our grade 8 runner in the 800m and 1500m creamed the field in both events by sitting on the top guy and just taking off with 200m and 300m to go respectively. However I was disappointed in the relays overall.