SPORTS

Yoder collects state medals, relay team sets school mark

Staff Writer
Echo Pilot
Alex Yoder runs the 100.

On the heels of a tremendous performance at the District 3-AAA Championships last weekend, Greencastle-Antrim’s Alex Yoder faced returning to the top of his game again Friday and Saturday at the PIAA State Track and Field Championships at Shippensburg University.

While he didn’t match that district stint, he made it another memorable weekend. Yoder collected his first state track medal with a sixth in the 100 meter dash and then proceeded to grab another with a third in the 200 meter dash.

To add icing to the cake, Yoder, along with his teammates in the 400 meter relay, Denton Cordell, Austin Scott and Trentin Dixon, put themselves in the Greencastle-Antrim record book.

Yoder came into the 100 as the top seed on a time of 10.86. In the preliminaries Friday, he ran a 11.01 for fourth in his heat, good enough to move on to Saturday’s semifinals. On Saturday, Yoder qualified for the finals on time, finishing in fourth in his heat, but with a top-eight time of 11.16.

In Saturday’s championship final, Yoder ran an 11.19 for sixth. The gold medal time of 10.87 was just off Yoder’s district-winning mark.

The Blue Devil senior may not have expected as much from the 200. He was seeded third in that race on a time of 21.99, but came out on top of his preliminary heat with a 22.24. Yoder easily advanced to the finals with a 22.31 for second in his semifinal heat.

The championship final was also solid for Yoder. He finished third in 22.49 for the bronze. Again his seed time was under the winning time of 22.09.

While the 4x100 relay team didn’t move out of the preliminaries Friday after finishing fifth in its heat, the time of 42.81 was special all the same. No G-A quartet had ever gone that fast in the race, giving Scott, Dixon, Cordell and Yoder no state medal, but a great place in the school history books.

The group went into the event with a seed time of  43.13. No other G-A 400 relay team had gone under 43 seconds. Yoder will leave G-A with the school record in the 100, 200 and 400 relay.