Competing on a perfect night of weather, the Warsaw Tigers girls track and field team kept its perfect season record in tact.
The Warsaw girls won Tuesday's Northern Lakes Conference Meet at Warsaw Community High School with 150.5 points, giving them their third-straight conference title.
"We're going in the right direction," Warsaw girls coach Scott Erba said of his team, which went through the NLC regular season at 7-0. "We talked with the girls after winning the first (title), about making this a habit. This year, we talked about how long it's been since a school won three in a row. What that means is, it's no just having individuals who've come in and done really well to carry the team, but having a team and having a deep team. That's what we've really benefited from."
Along with the girls' perfection this year, Leonard Wells also kept his perfect season in tact on the guys side, winning the discus and shot put.
"In the shot, I finished 58-11.75, but I still think I can throw better than that," Wells said. "In discus, it was my second longest (174-10), but I still think I can go farther. Everything was feeling great."
Well's throw of 174-10 in the discus was 32-feet, 8-inches farther than the second-place throw of Plymouth's Leneil Himes. At shot, Well's distance of 58-11.75 was 9-feet, 5-inches farther than second-place Nate Romine of Northridge's 49-6.
With those kind of distances, it's easy to see why Wells is one of the state favorites. And with the conference meet being the first of the postseason, leading to sectionals, regionals and state, he's gotten off on the right foot.
"It feels great to go out there and compete with everyone else in the conference," Wells said. "Hopefully, I can go down to state and compete too.
"This is where I wanted to begin, right here," he added.
While Wells won his first two championships at the meet, Wawasee senior Eric Brown collected his fourth-straight 400 dash title, winning this year's in 48.56.
"I'm actually (running) lower than where I wanted to be, so that's good," Brown said. "Hopefully, I can keep dropping and trimming my times."
After winning the 400, Brown finished the night by running the anchor leg of Wawasee's first-place 1600 relay team, which beat out Plymouth by a tenth-of-a-second.
Just as he did Friday at Warsaw's Max Truex Invitational, Brown received the baton trailing, but once again fought back down the stretch to take the slim win. Unlike the Truex race, which saw Brown trailing by about 50 meters when he received the baton, Plymouth's Curtis Ivy had a much slimmer advantage, but his fate was still the same against the fastest 400 runner in the area.
"I'd seen him run before when we faced Plymouth earlier this season, but he ran better than I thought he was going to," Brown said about Ivy. "But I was just thinking about running my race, running below a 48 and catching him at the end - which I did, luckily."
The only other area guy to win an event was David Spangle in the high jump, clearing 6-5, but the Warsaw girls had five winners, including Lauren Pridgen (200), Cendall Ogle (1600), Megan Kammerer (pole vault), Megan Davis (discus) and Sarah Shilling (shot put).
"Our girls ran tremendously tonight," Erba said. "We had the best runs we've had all year, and that helped out everyone. We talked about other teams having great athletes all over the place. We saw that with Plymouth's victories, Northridge's victories, Goshen's victories and Memorial had wins up there. We had to perform at our highest level, and we did that tonight."
Fresh off winning their third-straight NLC championship, the Warsaw girls now turn their attention to Tuesday's sectional, which will also be ran at Warsaw.
"Our goal here is to score as many points as possible, and it turns out that our lineup next week will be pretty similar to what we ran tonight," Erba said. "There's no reason we can't have the same type of performance or something better."
