Tallulah Falls School’s track & field team competed in the GHSA State Championships May 9-11 at Berry College.
Day one running preliminaries started out with the TFS girls 4×1 relay (Sydney Spivey, Damali Danavall, Reid Kafsky, Macy Murdock) setting another school record by running 51.13 to move up from a #9 seed to finish with the sixth best prelim time and advance to the finals. Sydney Spivey (100m hurdles) and Grey Bourlet (110m hurdles) then stamped their way to the hurdle finals. Chris Geiger ran 2:06.62 to place 12th. Reid Kafsky tied her 200m PR after a deluge to place 12th; she was one of only three of the fifteen in the race to improve upon her seed time. Spivey ran 50.50 in the 300m hurdles but did not make finals. Bourlet made the finals of the longer barrier race.
TFS girls 4×4 quartet of Madison Ball, Laurel Smith, Reid Kafsky, and Macy Murdock ran 4:23.01 to qualify for the last seasonal race. Their male peers (Gabe Iluma, Mohamed Kanu, Geiger, Bourlet) ran 3:44.53 but did not advance.
In the field events, sophomore Emily Gay – in her first year of pole vaulting – placed third with a foot and a half PR, tying the 9’ 6” school record of Davidson Wildcat athlete Anna Davis! Senior Chance Bess finished sixth in the discus with four throws beyond his previous PR! Damali Danavall finished ninth in the discus and 12th in the shot put. Jenni Gallagher finished 12th in the pole vault.
All week long, the forecast for the season pinnacle was thunderstorms, near 100% rain, and lightning for the Saturday finals. Thankfully, the skies clouded, misted, and broke open much like TFS performances. Lady Indians 4×1 relay (Spivey, Danavall, Kafsky, Murdock) started the day by placing seventh in the school’s second best time ever.
Spivey followed that with a third place 100m hurdle performance! Counterpart Bourlet darted a school record 14.97 (eclipsing current Davidson athlete James Davis high school best) in the 110m barrier race to also place third. The sophomore later scored another third place six team points in the longer hurdle race, only .05 out of the runner-up spot. Grey was also given “the coin” by peer graduating pole vaulters, an Area 2 A-Private tradition given to what they feel is the top up and coming pole vaulter with the expectation of success and passing on the tradition.
The girls 4×4 relay team has made it a tradition in the last few years to PR in the final race, to leave it all on the track in a memorable legacy. Once again, the team cut off drastic seconds – this time five! – from the previous season best (set at Area) to finish sixth and become #3 on the TFS Legacy List. The significance goes well beyond the strong place for this team and the astounding time drop (all four relay legs ran PR splits); this quartet of young ladies (Spivey, MadBall, Smith, Murdock) overcame significant challenges as they unleashed the beast within while inspiring those cognizant enough to recognize the impact interscholastic athletics has upon the psyche, upon relationships, and upon conquering internal struggles to finish as a new person ready to change the world!
TFS girls finished 16th with 17 points. TFS Boys finished 13th with 18 points.
TFS results https://ga.milesplit.com/meets/346233/teams/4745#.XNiBEtNKgnU
RELATED: GHSA Track & Field State Championships
