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Girard relay closes fast to clinch trophy
By Joe Scalzo
AUSTINTOWN
Just before the final event of Saturday’s Division II regional meet, Girard High girls track coach John Spano went up to his 4x400-meter relay and said, “Girls, I’m going to tell you something: We need to get third or better to get runner-up in this meet.
“They go, ‘Coach, we got this.’”
Seniors Justine Kagy, Alexis Cloud and Taylor Harshbarger and freshman Makayla Trebella ran a blistering 4:00.28 in the 4x400 to edge CVCA by a half-second and capture the Indians’ first regional runner-up trophy in school history at Austintown Fitch High.
“They’re gonna give it everything they have,” Spano said of the Indians, who finished with 43 points — 10 behind Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary and two in front of Beaumont, which won the 4x400 relay. “They won’t take a second seat to anybody. They’re gonna go out there and compete all the time.
“It’s fantastic to be their coach.”
Cloud also finished third in the 300 hurdles and Kagy, Cloud and Trebella joined junior Caitlyn Trebella on the fourth-place 4x200 relay, which was forced to insert Makayla after their fastest 200 runner, senior Destiny Hall, suffered a leg injury last week. The top four in each event advance to the state meet.
“My freshman sister stepped in and beat Ursuline on the last leg [by .05 seconds] and I couldn’t be any more proud of her,” Caitlyn Trebella said.
Caitlyn Trebella also placed second in the pole vault with a school-record jump of 10 feet, but rather than try to extend the record, she asked Spano if she could stop jumping in order to focus on the 4x200 “and see if I can get my sister into this [state] meet.”
“Every one of these kids is like that,” Spano said. “They’ll do anything for each other.”
Ursuline junior Alex Carnathan won her second straight regional 100 title with a time of 12.39 and helped the 4x100 relay place second as the Irish finished fourth in the team standings with 40 points.
Carnathan admitted she was nervous before the 100, especially since announcer Andris Balputnis singled her out before the race as the “athlete to watch.”
“Yeah, he announced that I was the defending champ and said my whole name and what I did in Columbus [last year] and that made me nervous,” she said. “It felt good to do it again.”
Ursuline’s 4x100 relay also entered as the defending regional champions but couldn’t catch Canal Fulton Northwest, which finished in 49.18 — two-tenths of a second ahead of the Irish.
“It makes us realize how lucky we were to experience [last year’s state meet] as sophomores because not a lot of sophomores make it to that level,” said Carnathan, who is joined on the relay by Korree Cotton, Precious Williams and Paige Hall. “That really helped us because we’ve done this before and we kind of knew what to expect.”
Ursuline senior Lavonte Powell placed second in the 100 and 200, shaking off bad starts in both races. Powell’s best race is the 200, but she suffered a charley horse while she was in the starting blocks.
“Right when he said ‘set,’ it was like ‘Bam!” Powell said. “I had to fight through it. I saw I had a chance to make it [to state] and I pulled off somehow by the grace of God.”