Lakeville South girls team finishes sixth in Class 3A
Lauren Reynolds is Lakeville North’s closer on the girls 4x100-meter relay. She said she generally runs better when there’s someone to pursue, but that wasn’t the case at the state Class 3A track and field finals.
The first three members of the North relay – Olivia Grecco, Kiah Blalark and Shelita Franklin – had Reynolds at least even with the competition when she started the final 100 meters. The senior pulled away, and the Panthers had one of their two first-place finishes at the state finals June 8 at St. Michael-Albertville High School.
“I always do better when I chase, but this year I focused more on myself in my own lane for the benefit of my team,” Reynolds said. “I looked at what was in front of me instead of worrying about what was behind me.”
The anchor runners from the other eight teams that reached the 4x100 finals were behind her as North finished in 48.24 seconds, a season best for the group. Champlin Park took second in 48.38. Lakeville South also reached the finals, taking fourth in 48.67.
“It was a bit of a different feeling,” Reynolds said. “(Running with the lead) was something I kind of wasn’t used to, but it ended up giving us a gold medal.”
Reynolds and Grecco are holdovers from North’s state second-place 4x100 relay from 2023, while Franklin and Blalark were new to the relay. Grecco and Franklin are juniors and Blalark is a ninth-grader.
Things didn’t always go smoothly; the North group didn’t win the 4x100 at the South Suburban Conference championships, finishing behind Rosemount. “Then at sections, we blew it all away,” Grecco said. “We ran 48.4 at sections and then 48.2 (at state).
“What got us to first place in the end was just repetition, getting the handoffs down and trusting each other.”
The Lakeville North boys 4x800 relay also made the jump from second in 2023 to state champions this season. Eli Olson, Chase Altergott, Landon Nerison and Darby Griffin finished in 7 minutes, 54.27 seconds, about 1.5 seconds ahead of Eden Prairie. Griffin, a junior, and Altergott, a senior, ran on the second-place Lakeville North relay in 2023. This year’s relay ran about three seconds faster at state.
Griffin also was one of the runners on a North team that set an all-time state record in the 4x800 at the Class 3A, Section 1 True Team meet in May 2023.
Lakeville North was eighth in the Class 3A girls team competition and 17th in the boys meet. Minnetonka was Class 3A girls champion, while Rosemount’s boys finished one point ahead of Wayzata for its third championship in four years.
Panthers senior Trinity Wilson took second place in the girls shot put with a throw of 42 feet, 8.5 inches on her final attempt. That was only four inches short of her personal record, but even that wouldn’t have overtaken Rogers senior Anya Schmidt who had a winning throw of 43-11.75
Wilson had a fourth place in the discus with 126-8, contributing 16 points in the two throwing events toward the Lakeville North girls’ total of 31.
Blalark finished seventh in the girls 200 in 25.50, scoring three team points.
The 4x800 relay scored 12 of the Lakeville North boys’ 24 points at state. Ten more came from senior Tyler Christianson in the 300 hurdles. In a duel between South Suburban Conference athletes, Rosemount’s Maki Whelan won the 300 hurdles in 38.00, with Christianson finishing second in 38.50. Christianson came into the state meet with the fastest qualifying time in the event.
Griffin reached the finals in the boys 800 and finished eighth in 1:56.59.
Lakeville South
Lakeville South’s girls scored points in eight events at the state Class 3A finals and finished sixth in the team standings with 43 points. It concluded a season in which the Cougars also won the South Suburban Conference championship and finished second in the state Class 3A True Team meet.
The Minnesota State High School League meet was “an exciting way to cap off what was one of the best seasons our program has experienced, which says a lot considering some of the teams we’ve had in the past,” South coach Andrew Hilliard said.
Cougars senior Alexa Drew medaled in two individual events and one relay. She took fourth in the long jump with 17-8.75, the Lakeville South girls program’s best-ever finish in a horizontal jumping event at state.
Drew added a seventh place in the 100 dash in a personal-record 12.21.
Senior Kate Flicek earned medals in the shot put and discus, becoming only the third Lakeville South girl to achieve All-State in both throwing events in the same year. Flicek placed fifth in the discus with a personal-record 124-11 and was seventh in the shot put with 38-10.
Sophomore Eva Welsch went from seventh in the 100 hurdles preliminaries to third in the finals with a personal-best 14.65. Avery Sandmann, a junior, also bagged a personal record in the 300 hurdles, placing sixth in the finals in 45.55.
Claire Vukovics, Josie Hudson, Audrey Schmidtke and Taylor Tetner finished third in the 4x800 relay in 9:15.45. In the 4x100 relay Taylor Glinski, Sandmann, Welsch and Drew were fourth in 48.67. Both relay times broke school records.
Four teams from South Suburban Conference schools made the final nine in the boys 4x100 relay. The Lakeville South relay of Ismail Mohamed, Jonah Shine, Max Zagorski and Connor Cade finished seventh in 42.56 to score the Cougar boys team’s three points at the state meet.
Ninth-grader Ian Holland just missed medaling in the boys discus, placing 10th.
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