SCRANTON – Preston Klem captured gold medals each day – as a relay member Monday and on his own Tuesday – to highlight Pittston Area boys efforts during the District 2 Track and Field Championships at Memorial Stadium.
Klem earned both gold medals in his specialty – running 800 meters.
The senior joined two sophomores and a freshman in the winning effort in the 3200-meter relay Monday.
Caden Boettger led off, freshman Brady Tucker ran the second leg and Jakob Mead was third.
Klem received the baton for the final leg in third place, more than four seconds behind eventual silver medalist Abington Heights.
Setting a scorching pass, he took the lead with 400 meters to go, by running the fastest lap of any of the 72 participants from 18 teams. After moving to the front with a seventh lap of 54.31 seconds, he finished up the fastest leg.
Klem’s time of 1:54.75 over the final 800 meters brought the Patriots home in 8:08.64, a little more than a half-second in front of the Comets.
The second gold medal came the next day when Klem won his second straight head-to-head battle with Hazleton Area’s Franklin Ritz, one of District 2’s top middle-distance and distance runners.
After beating Ritz by 1.13 seconds for the Wyoming Valley Conference Championships title, Klem ran a time of 1:57.61 to pull out a win by just one-tenth of a second.
The relay victory was one of two for the Pittston Area program in the Class 3A portion of the meet.
Ali Butcher, Jenna Grieco and Annika Lien joined three-event gold medalist Aria Messner for the win in the girls 400 relay that was part of a third-place overall team finish by the Lady Patriots.
The Lady Patriots repeated as winners of the event, beating Abington Heights by more than a second to finish in 49.54.
Pittston Area had 55 team points, taking third in the 19-team field behind only unbeaten division champions Dallas and Abington Heights, which had a close battle well ahead of the rest of the field. Dallas won 113½-110½.
The Pittston Area boys scored 44 points to finish seventh in a meet won by Scranton, which edged Hazleton Area 72½-70.
Jalen Moore again joined Klem as the team’s top performers.
Moore came up nine-hundredths of a second short in the 400 dash, taking second in 50.85 seconds. He was also third in the 200 and part of the eighth-place team in the 1600 relay where he followed Klem. Boettger and Franklin Garcia were also on that team.
Lucas LoPresto finished fourth in the triple jump and Gage Leffler was fifth in the 300 hurdles.
The Lady Patriots had six other girls earn individual medals.
Paige Bittman was fifth in the high jump; Jenna Grieco and Sadie Gregory were sixth in the 100 and triple jump; Elinor Schardien tied for sixth in the pole vault; and Maddie Jackubowski and Isabella Dessoye were seventh in the 100 hurdles and 800.
Dessoye, Molly Fetchko, Camryn Karp and Olivea Scalese combined to take eighth in the 3200 relay.
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