Juniors Adeline Ocean and Jasmine Gray running the two mile race. Photo by Alysha McDevitt.
As the outdoor track season begins, coaches and athletes alike have established common goals for the season: to win a majority of their meets this season, as well as grow as a team. They intend to start the season off strong in the new league.
Coach Londino hopes to go into the North Eastern Conference with a winning streak. Londino is “excited for the new league” and how it will bring more competitive meets to the team as well as gain even more state qualifiers. Londino will find this league different because there are sixteen leagues in the Conference and out of those sixteen leagues, Malden will compete with eight of them. Each meet will be more competitive and harder. He also thinks that the new runners that they have are really talented and a few will be able to make it to varsity.
Athletes on the team include Taymise Sanders, Rachel Loreus, Lisa Ringdahl, and Adela Dzaferagic. They all have high hopes for the season which is to make it to all states. They are excited for the new league as well, since it will bring tougher competition. Sanders states that the team is “very hard-working and even practice in the rain.” Since they lost some runners last year, they will have to build up their underclassmen. Sanders also believes that the new runners will do great this season because the freshmen in indoor track were talented runners. Ringdahl states the she “is sad about losing runners from last year but it won’t really hurt them because they have new freshman they can train.”
Dzaferagic states they have many goals this season which includes “going for 4-0 for the beginning of this season, and knocking down as many meets as they can.” She also believes that they will face a lot of challenges this season. The team will be facing a lot of new teams that have strong runners, and because of that Dzaferagic believes that the team has to “work on their depth”. She also mentions that the distance runners will be putting more work into their practices because a lot of the schools they’ve been facing have a lot of feeder programs that train runners in middle school. Since Malden doesn’t have that, they will have be conditioned more. Loreus believes that in regards of the boys and girls sprinters they have to build up their stamina and speed.
All in all, as the season starts, the outdoor track team has very high expectations for this season and plan to hit the ground running.
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