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Girls Track: Elmwood Park places fifth at league meet
Elmwood Park's Melody Betancourt competes in the discus, during the Metro Suburban Conference girls track and field meet at Fenton on Friday. | Jerry Daliege~for Sun-Times Media
Updated: June 11, 2012 8:47AM
It was rough going on Friday night for the Elmwood Park girls track team at the Metro Suburban Conference meet at Fenton.
The Tigers finished in fifth place in the seven-team field with 29 points. Glenbard South won it all with 203 points with Illiana Christian taking second with 138 and Timothy Christian rounding out the top three with 97. Elmwood Park had a pair of top-three all-conference finishes overall.
“It was less tonight than I expected,” said Elmwood Park head coach John Kingsmill regarding his team’s performance. “On a night like (this), we usually find a way to overachieve, but not this time. This was my hardest line-up I’ve had to put together. It was like putting a puzzle together, and I didn’t have all the pieces, and that left a lot of holes in the puzzle.”
The top finisher for the Tigers was in the person of Patricia Wojcik. The senior took second in the shot put with a throw of 34 feet, 1¼ inches besting her previous top distance of 32-6. That earned her a second consecutive all-conference honor.
“I was running around trying to do all my events,” Wojcik said. “It is sort of difficult trying to focus on the (800-meter relay) or the (400 relay) when I still have to throw. However, I’m glad that the coaches understand when I check out and check back in again for each event. I felt very good about shot this meet. I felt pumped and ready.”
The other all-conference honoree was junior Michelle Accettura. Her time of 1 minute, 3 seconds in the 400-meter dash was good enough for third place just a half second off her seeding time.
Senior Layla Alazawy took fifth in the 300 hurdles to match her seed time of 54 seconds. The closest the Tigers got to a third all-conference performance came in the 1600 relay. Accettura, freshman Gianna Rubino, and sophomores Maira Figueroa and Linda Langkamp combined to knock 9.1 seconds off their seed time to run the race in 4:20.9 just a one place and a couple of seconds off the second and final all-conference post.
“I didn’t think I’d use her in any varsity races this year, but she turned into our most dependable runner,” Kingsmill said of Accettura. “We shouldn’t have ended up in third in the (1600), but we just couldn’t make it on the last 100 meters.”
