The track season at Lambert has officially ramped up. Lambert Track and Field athletes are working hard to compete their best at meets and come out with a win every time. Their season kicked off on January 22, and their next meet is coming up fast on April 8 at West Forsyth High School.
Junior Emaline Dupree is a 300-meter hurdler who has been running since her freshman year. She has high hopes for her junior season coming off of a new personal record of 54.49 seconds.
“My overall goal for this season is to get my time down so I can advance past region,” Dupree noted.
Track and field revolves around beating one’s opponent in races, one’s own personal record and contributing to the overall team score to win. The team has been hitting new personal records and goals almost every meet by practicing every day. Practices allow athletes to train to beat one’s own record to qualify for the Region competition and more.
“We practice every day after school; some days we do sprint work and on other days we practice the events we will be competing in the meets,” Dupree said.
All of the athletes competing put in lots of effort and time into their training, making the region meet very difficult to make it to. Each athlete has to qualify for region and state in order to continue on with their season.
The sport consists of many different events; There are hurdles where the athlete runs a specific distance while also managing to jump over the hurdles. Athletes also run long distance and short distance relays, where multiple individuals compete together, but also individual races. Each athlete trains for their specific event, which helps foster a strong team dynamic boasting a variety of different skills.
“Our team has a variety of athletes, which challenges everyone to do their best at every practice,” Dupree shared.
All of the individual events lead to the teams overall score for that meet, and the goal is to set a personal record, win your event and then win the meet as a team.
Sophomore Sam Billington, who runs the 100m, 200m, 400m, 300m hurdles and 110m hurdles, has set some personal goals for this season as well.
“My biggest goal this season is to make it to sectionals by placing at regionals in one of my events at the end of April,” Billington explained.
Billington has a challenging training schedule that varies depending on the day of the week.
“A typical training week starts with an endurance workout or hills on Monday,” Billington shared. “Depending on when we have meets, we do block work and some lighter training the day before a meet.”
Balancing track with other aspects of his life is important for Billington; school work on top of practice is difficult, but Billington found his own way to manage all the different aspects of student-athlete life.
“Finish school work when you can after practices or meets, as practice ends at 5:30 and meets end early afternoon on Saturdays,” Billington added.
Lambert Athletics entered the 6A division this school year, which means that they have harder competition.
“The hardest competition this year is North Atlanta, as they are new to our region this year and have a lot of good athletes,” Billington noted.
Even though competition is tough this season, Emaline Dupree and Sam Billington are hoping to achieve their goals as individual runners and as a team. They hope to perform their best all season long.
