Looking to celebrate their Senior Night and the end of four years of conditioning drills and competition days, Fairfax (Virginia) High School’s B-heat relay team made a last-minute decision this past Wednesday to swap out the 4x100’s usual baton for something a bit more challenging.
So they ditched the customary prop, grabbed a high jump bar and headed to the outside lane, hoping to pull off the trick without tripping up the track's other teams.
A high jump bar. You know, that roughly four-meter-long rod that’s about a dozen times as long as a relay baton.
The runners had never practiced with the bar before and had no expectations of notching the win. But thanks to a Herculean come-from-behind effort from anchor Erin Hopkins, the team danced across the finish line first, pole in hand, victory tallied.
“The whole time I was running, I was just like, ‘This is really, really fun,'” Te’Ona Witherspoon, who took on the first leg, told LetsRun. “I love my teammates. Everybody who was on the 4×1 team, we’re all really, really close. It was just fun. [I haven’t heard any] negative feedback.”
We’re all for this one. Way to make sports fun again, Fairfax track and field team. One Senior Night at a time.