There is something to be said about having quality competition to bring out the best in an athlete.

Not that sophomore Ida Reiniger needs much motivation because she has proven to be a talented hurdler.

For the second consecutive year, the Southold/Greenport track star earned All-State honors by finishing fifth in the Class C girls’ 400-meter hurdles at the New York State track and field championships at Webster Schroeder High School in Webster on June 13.

She also ran a personal record and continued to break her school record, running the event in 65.80 seconds.

“She gave a really great performance,” Settlers coach Tim McArdle said. “We had a plan going in to try to work as hard as we can. We really put in a strong month of practice to try to get her better and better each week. She constantly showed performance progress each week that she competed. She really wanted it.”

As it turned out, Reiniger had stumbled at the end of the last hurdle.

That “probably cost her three-tenths of a second or so, but she still was able to get a personal record and compete at a really high level,” McArdle said.

It certainly has helped that Reiniger is very coachable.

“She’s very down to earth,” McArdle said. “She’s very willing to try whatever needs to be tried. She’s willing to work hard when I ask her to work hard. But she also has input, too. She’s part of the process. Sometimes she tells me that her body needs rest, or sometimes she tells me that she needs to try something else.”

And remember, Reiniger is only a sophomore, with two years remaining to continue to break her school record and perhaps much more.

“The future is bright,” McArdle said. “The goal is to keep climbing that leaderboard. We have two more years ahead of us, and I would love to see her be a state champ at some point.”

Other Southold athletes participated in the states:

* Junior Devin Stanton finished in 12th place in the girls’ long jump at 17 feet and eight inches, her best jump of the season.

“Devon jumped great,” McArdle said. “All of her jumps were really solid. Some of her best performances of the season happened at that state championship. She’s definitely peaking at the right time. She was dealing with a little bit of a sickness that definitely hindered her a little bit, but she was in great spirits.

“She went out there, and she competed. She made a concerted effort to give it her all. When you dedicate yourself to something, and you’re willing to let everything else go, amazing things can happen.”

* Junior Le Neve Zuhoski took seventh in the girls discus with a throw of 104.08.

“She didn’t have her best performance of the season. There’s a lot that goes into this weekend. We train really hard for a couple weeks. So, it’s a lot of intense training,” McArdle said. “Then you couple that with 10 hours’ worth of traveling in one day.

“You’re sleeping in a random hotel room, you don’t sleep too good. You’re nervous, you’re excited, you’re eating different things. Sometimes it just doesn’t always come together on that day.”

* Sophomore Michael Garret finished 14th in the shot put with a 34-2 toss.

* Junior Emmett Tramontana finished 15th in the discus with a 111-11 throw. 

“Weather conditions and the travel played a role in their performances, but both of them left with the motivation to hit the weight room and to start training for next year once they got back to the island,” boys’ coach Joe Corrado said.

Three Mattituck athletes also competed.

* Junior Ever Meyer, competing in her second state competition in the girls pentathlon, finished 12th (2,036 points).

* Junior Charlie Carter, who took up the boys’ pentathlon just this spring season, earned a 12th-place finish (2,589).

* Senior Anthony Soto took 16th place in the boys’ 400 hurdles in 1:02.19, shaving 1.33 seconds off what he ran at the state qualifiers.     

The post Settlers’ Ida Reiniger earns All-State for second straight year appeared first on The Suffolk Times.

Source link

24World Media does not take any responsibility of the information you see on this page. The content this page contains is from independent third-party content provider. If you have any concerns regarding the content, please free to write us here: contact@24worldmedia.com