Western Albemarle sends athletes to Indoor Track National competitions year after year. This year is no exception: over 14 athletes from the girls’ track team went to the Adidas Nationals competition. With that huge number in attendance, four girls stood out the most. Senior Emerson Ritter, Junior Sarah Jane Broadbent, and Sophomores Zoey Downer and Hannah Seideman became national champions in the distance medley relay; a race these girls had never run before. This is the first national championship in our school history.
The distance medley relay is special because it is four separate distances – 400m, 800m, 1200m, and 1600m – run by four different athletes. The race started with sophomore Zoey Downer running the 1200-meter leg. Downer ran a time of 3:57.94, which got the team into third-place standing. Downer handed off to junior Sarah Jane Broadbent, who ran the 400-meter with a time of 63.43 to maintain the team’s third place standing. Broadbent passed off to sophomore Hannah Seidman, who ran the 800-meter with a personal best time of 2:32.01, still maintaining that third place finish. Finally, Seidman passed off to senior Emerson Ritter for the 1600 meter leg.
Very quickly, Ritter had put the team into a second place position, striding closely with the girl in first place. Here is where the controversy began. Right before the sixth lap, the meet organizer rang the bell. Usually, the bell is rung in a race to signal that the runner in first place is about to start her last lap and other runners should start sprinting for the finish. In this case, the bell should have been rung before the eighth lap, not the sixth. The early bell confused all of the runners, and the runner in first place stopped two laps early. Ritter, however, realized what had happened and started running again and finished in first.
All of the teams were confused and sought to contest the outcome of the race. When asked about the situation post-race, Coach Katie Pugh said, “the other teams were claiming that they had won. And you know, it was kind of uncomfortable. But what I liked about it was that it gave our girls a chance to find their voice, to realize, okay, we actually did the thing right. We figured it out. We earned this both by our athletic ability and by our ethics.”
Pugh also said, “one of our team mottos is ‘play fair even when others don’t.’ Even though it’s not how we would have wanted to win, a national championship is a national championship and we are super excited.”
Ritter reflected very positively on the experience as a whole. She said, “being able to share that memory now with my team is so important to me.”
Broadbent said, “it hasn’t really sunk in yet, but it was a lot of fun coming back to the team and being like, yeah, we won. But I think the younger girls look up to us more, so we have to be more of a leader for them.”
