St. Regis launches into track season

A St. Regis eighth-grader got off to a fast start in the junior high track season.

In the team’s first meet of the season, she not only won an event and had two personal best performances, she also set the school record — the high school record.

Juliana “Sissy” Spencer finished the 1,600-meter run in 6 minutes and 22.61 seconds to win the event at the Noxon Junior High Track Meet in Plains Friday. Spencer’s time also beat the St. Regis High School record of 6 minutes and 43 seconds set by Brianna Managhan.

“Exhausted. I just wanted to fall over,” Spencer said is how she felt running the last lap. With her lungs burning and her teammates lining the track cheering her on, Spencer said all she was focused on was beating the record the last lap. “I just kept thinking, I have to beat Brianna Managhan,” she said.

“I feel good. My legs are kind of tingling, but I feel good,” said Spencer after the race, when she found out that she beat the record and had a chance to catch her breath.

Spencer’s run Friday was actually the second time she had broke the high school record, but it doesn’t officially count because she’s not a high school student. Last year, Spencer ran the 1,600 in 6 minutes and 28 seconds. “She’s an amazing athlete,” said second-year St. Regis coach Tamara Williams. Williams said that Spencer is a hard worker and expects her to keep whittling the seconds off of her time in the 1,600. She said that by the end of the year Spencer should be running the 1,600 in just over six minutes.

Spencer also set a personal best distance in the triple jump. Her distance of 23 feet, 10 inches was good enough for a third place finish in the event.

Spencer was one of 21 athletes from St. Regis competing in the event. Williams said that the Tigers have nearly doubled in size from last year, with a lot of the athletes trying track and field for the first time. She said for the first track meet of the year she thought they did pretty well. “A lot of them were competing in events, they had never competed in,” she said.

Nine schools took 209 athletes to the meet, which was moved to Plains because of the heavy winter snow in Noxon had left their track in poor condition. The athletes were split in two divisions. The eighth-graders competed against other eighth-graders in the A division and seventh-graders and under competed in the B division.

The Plains A squad won the girls’ event and Troy A squad won the boys’ events.