Track underclassmen overwhelm Hawthorne

Eloise GrahamStaff WriterSamo's track and field team triumphed in their season opener against Hawthorne, placing first in every event."It was kind of like a dress rehearsal," coach Tania Fischer said. "It was just our opener to work out the kinks to see if our relays are doing well."Fischer says that the freshmen and sophomores are off to a strong start but there is always room for improvement, senior captain Tarek Kassem agrees."I see a lot of potential in these people and I think they can really do well. I think yesterday was a good indication of what people need to work on, but I don't believe yesterday was a good representation of the performance our team can put out," Kassem said.Senior captain, Barrington Moore feels optimistic about the season but also believes that the team did not perform to its full potential at Thursday's meet."I think we can win league this year. Our distance is looking good, our sprints are looking better. so is our field. Right now I think our team is a better developed than it was last year. It wasn't the best meet for our sprints because our varsity team is really short right now and a lot of us have injuries that we were running on so we are more focused on future meets. It was Hawthorne so we weren't really too worried," Moore said.This year, the team is extremely young with well over two thirds of the players being underclassmen. According to Fischer, some freshmen are performing at an upperclassmen level."A lot of times we have freshmen who run faster and if I throw in a freshman it's good because we're going to get those points. We have a lot of girl sprinters who are freshmen. Our team is really young we really only have a handful of upperclassmen," Fischer said.The team won all 16 categories of the track meet. Hawthorne's team is made up of mostly fast sprinters, but they lack in distance runners. Because of Hawthorne's skill level, the pressure was lightened for the freshmen who were about to compete in their first track meet. Hawthorne has a small team and is unable to accumulate as many easy points. Therefore, the Hawthorne to Samo player ratio was in Samo's favor."In this case, we didn't have to worry so much because of Hawthorne's size. We need to work on pushing the athletes faster because we know what's out there," Fischer said.While underclassmen are surpassing all expectations, there is still world of improvement ahead of them."We have freshmen that are standing out. Track [is categorized] by enrollment so we're in division one. But, if you really start looking at times in division one we have a long way to go. But in league, we're competitive. It's tough because its hard to get your athletes to think outside of league. There's a whole other world out there and they're running so much faster," Fischer said.