A mostly sunny weekend, great breeze, high in the mid-eighties, and the thought of school almost being over in mind. Now for most kids my age, this sounds like a recipe for spending all day at North Avenue Beach up in my hometown, Chicago. This past weekend, that was far from the case. Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday called thousands from across the state of Illinois, including myself and our esteemed Milesplit Illinois Team, to the “Blue Oval” of O’Brien Stadium at Eastern Illinois University. For my third year in a row, I had the privilege to miss out on school for the last Thursday and Friday of May in order to head down to state to cover the photography side of coverage from Milesplit.
Thursday morning, I woke up past my alarm for school, and met up with part of our Milesplit crew to take that three hour drive through fields upon fields and the occasional farm to reach Charleston, IL. Quite an unfamiliar sight for me, being a city slicker. This was my first year going down with the Milesplit team, as I would usually go down with my high school team: Lane Tech. We made it to the press box after talking track stats and about life all car ride to catch the action of the 1A 1600m preliminary race, and mainly to see Jon Davis demolishing the field without any problems.
I ate dinner with my school’s team and downed my annual “double bypass” burger at the local, and very slowly paced restaurant, packed with fellow athletes and coaches: Stadium Grill. As the team prepped later that night to take on the track the next day for the 3A preliminary meet, I began to put together my gear for the first of two long, very hot, and successful days of photographing out in O’Brien Stadium. Three years of this job and each year the experience becomes more important, between the time spent with my own teammates and those who I meet at the stadium. Now this year was hands down the best experience that I have had at a State Championship, whether it be for Cross Country or Track.
I am pretty sure everyone has heard about the crazy number of records being broken this weekend down in “Chucktown,” and the numbers are all over Milesplit. I have mentioned this in my previous article, and that is if you came here in search of the stats and times of the athletes, you came to the wrong place. The performances this weekend were above stellar, and the amount of effort that I saw being put in was second to none for these Illinois boys. Even in the face of a seemingly never ending weather delay that impeded the excitement on Saturday- that did not stop these athletes to put on their utmost performance.
Part of what made this State Championship so incredibly great to me was the coverage team that I work with at Milesplit. Having two guys running the live tweets of the numbers and such, at least two guys doing videos, and me photographing the excitement and wicked races, jumps, throws, you name it. Besides having a few more hands on deck for the team, another thing that was different was the addition of the new camera that I had just purchased. This allowed me to upload a handful of the thousands of photos that I took of the events right to my phone to be posted to Twitter to keep our large and growing audience satisfied with news coverage. Never have I received such positive feedback from such a widespread amount of people, which was seen as something to aspire to continue at future meets.
To close things out: I know Tony Jones wrote a lot about this in his Tony’s Take, but I’ll bring this up again anyway.
Two Words: School Pride. This weekend I saw a record being torn down for my school’s district, and what is great is that the guy who did that is a part of the huge family of the diverse and great school that I go to. I’m sure by now we all know the time he hit, have watched the video, or even have seen it in person, but as a teammate of the guy, seeing this victory brought me some of the best pride that I can have for our school of over four thousand teenagers in the city. Being a distance runner myself as I’ve mentioned before, I would run with the greats at my school, using them as examples of a goal that I have yet to accomplish. Seeing my friend do such great things while representing the Indians of Lane Tech, a school whose most recent first place leading up to Pavlo’s race was three years ago in the 4x800, another CPS first, is something that I can definitely see as being the highlight of my experience down at State this year. Not only that, but the support he received from not just the excited and astonished audience, but from his opponent in the race as seen in the photo above, is part of the reason as to why I come back to photograph these meets for hours on end, and will continue to do so.
