After winning MCAL in the boys’ division and placing third in the girls’ division last year, the track and field team is looking forward to another season of success in 2014.

Last year the boys’ team beat rival Drake by 17 points, and looks strong once again.

“We did graduate a lot of good runners, but we graduate people every year and we still have a lot of fast people, so I don’t think it will affect us that much,” senior captain Fred Huxham said. “It affects some other schools that graduated their top runners more.”

The graduation of Drake runners John Lawson and Clayton Hutchins, two of the top runners in MCAL, has eliminated some of the competition for the boys this year.

The girls’ team also did well last year, placing third in MCAL, but losing to rivals Novato and Tam.

“We’ve been neck and neck with [Tam] for a really long time,” said senior captain Lindsay Hendrickson. “Last year we finished pretty far behind them because they had this one girl who scored a bunch of points,  but she’s gone now so we have a better shot this year.”

That one girl was Jessica Rasmussen, who helped Tam build a 40-point lead over Redwood on her way to MCAL Player of the Year awards in both track and field.
Hendrickson said that even with Rasmussen gone, Redwood is still up for a challenging season against Novato and Tam.

The Giants had their first meet of the season on Feb. 22. The contest did not actually count for the team’s record but gave the participants a chance to prepare themselves for the upcoming season.

“The people who went did really well,” Hendrickson said. “I don’t think as well as they wanted, because it’s the first race of the season and nobody is in as good a shape as they are after conditioning, but for the first race of the season they did really well.”

The team should be able to outpace the rest of MCAL in long-distance events.

“What is especially good about this year is that we’re having more distance kids come from a solid season of cross country, run all winter, and then run track,” Huxham said. “They’re setting themselves up right to run really fast and set new personal records.”

Huxham himself is focusing on breaking the current school record for the mile. The current record is 4:10, set by Rod Berry in 1977.

“I’m the fastest kid from Redwood to run the cross country state course, so breaking the mile record is possible, but it’s obviously a challenge,” Huxham said.

The incoming crop of distance runners from cross country will offset the loss of some good runners who graduated last year, according to Hendrickson. She said that the distance running was the girls’ team primary strength.

“We have good sprinters, but we’ve never really been as good in the sprints as we have in the distance, so I think in the girls’ distance we’ll probably be stronger in terms of ranking,” Hendrickson said.

The Giants hope to continue the success they experienced last year, both as a team and individually.

“The boys would love to defend their MCAL title,” Huxham said. “Individually a lot of people have the goal of making it beyond MCALs and beyond the first NCS meet.”