By Marcus Krum
Staff Writer
@marcuskrum

At the end of the night, lifting up their respective District 7-6A first and second place trophies, the Cowgirls and Cowboys track teams kept their spirits high, as they are both moving on past the district round.

The District 7-6A Track and Field meet was held Coppell’s Buddy Echols Field.

Both the Coppell High School boys and girls side started off the day with a strong showing in the field events, with senior Marcus Mitchell placing first in the triple jump, junior Collin Echols coming in first in discus, and first and third place finishes in pole vault from senior Esere Nesiama and senior Chad Williams for the Cowboys. The girls had senior Rachel Johnson finish third in discus, senior Andrea Abel and Selase Buatsi coming in fourth and fifth in the triple jump, and second and third place in the pole vault from senior Kylie Pickrell and junior Sydney Gainer.

“By scoring in every category, that tells a lot about our kids, that it doesn’t matter who’s running what or who’s doing what field event, we’re all going to pull together and fight for the team title,” Coppell track coach Roxanne Farris said. “It’s the hardest one to win, but it’s the best one to win.”

As the track events began, it was clear that Southlake Carroll, L.D. Bell and Coppell were running away with the top three spots for the boys and girls.

“Going into the meet, we knew it was going to be pretty tight, but our kids scored in every event, and in most events, we had at least two to three people scoring, which for track, you have to have everybody score to win the district title,” Farris said. “We were counting on everybody to [gain team points].”

With the track events in full swing, both the Cowboys and Cowgirls started to rack up more points, getting first place finishes from Alan Huo in the 800 meter run and Matt Difransesco in the 100 meter dash for the boys and from the 4×200 team for the girls. The teams also received eight more second place finishes, including the men’s 4×400 run, in which their time of 3:20.35 set the new school record by one third of a second.

“I feel like I did pretty good. I set a personal record of mine,” Mitchell said. “The team overall, almost all of us [set personal records], and we went out there and got the [4×400 meter relay school record] by 0.33 seconds. I’m really proud of our team. We did good overall.”

On May 1, the teams head to the regional meet at Maverick Stadium in Arlington. While they did have success at the district level, the Cowboys and Cowgirls are looking to improve in the coming weeks before regionals.

“We always seem to perform our best as the level of competition rises,” Farris said. “We got some wakeup calls today. We get another week to get one week better, one week faster, and sometimes it’s better to be the underdogs than to have the target on your backs, and our kids know that. We’re going to hopefully [set personal records] next week and then hopefully go on to the regional meet and the go from there.”