For the second straight year, Covington Catholic is champions of indoor track and field.
The Colonels mowed through the competition at the KHSAA Class AA state track and field indoor meet with 90 points, beating the 31-team field by 43 points with Taylor County in second with 47 points.
It’s the second year the KHSAA has sanctioned indoor track and field as a winter sport, the meet hosted at the Norton Healthcare Sports & Learning Center in Louisville.
Like outdoor track and field, the state is broken up into three classes: A, AA and AAA. The Class 1A meet is on Wednesday, the Class AAA meet on Thursday.
Distance was the name of the game for the Colonels on Tuesday, Will Sheets and the 4×400 and 4×800 relay teams claimed state titles in their respective events.
Sheets won the 3,200 meters in a time of 9:33.25, his teammate Joe Mayer in second with a time of 9:35.16.
The 4×400 team of Jack Fleck, Sam Stout, Sheets and Jackson Schmid won in 3:31.86. The 4×800 team of Joel Barczak, Jack Salyers, Luke McLane and Sheets won in a time of 8:14.56, 17 seconds below their seed time. Sheets was runner-up in the 1,600 in 4:11.39 and Mayer was second in the 800 in 1:57.51 while Rhett Blettner was second in the 400 in 51.79.
Those six events netted the Colonels 62 points.
Others to get on the podium for the Colonels were Paul Klosinski in the pole vault (second place, 14-00), Jack Fleck in the 200 (third, 23.32), Schmid in the 400 (third place, 51.79), the 4×200 relay team of Will Danneman, Blettner, Charlie Ink and Fleck (fourth place, 1:34.86), Jackson Germann in the 1,600 (seventh place, 4:40.80), Matthew Woolf in the shot put (eighth place, 40-6.25).
Lloyd Memorial’s boys finished 13th with 19 points. Josiah Lockridge was runner-up in the 55-meter dash in 6.60 and in the 200 in 23.14. The Juggernauts 4×200 team of AJ Curry, LJ Herron, Aden Miller and Cameron Towbridge finished sixth in 3:41.01.