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Deep trouble hurts Fort Cherry in bid for girls title

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Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter

Fort Cherry’s Mara Whalen wins the 400-meter dash during the WPIAL Class AA Track & Field Championships at Peters Township High School on Monday, May 6, 2019.

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Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter

Fort Cherry’s Kayla Salvini runs the anchor leg as the win the 3,200-meter relay during the WPIAL Class AA Track & Field Team Championships at Peters Township High School on Monday.

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Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter

Fort Cherry’s Mara Whalen wins the 400-meter dash during WPIAL Class AA Track & Field Championships at Peters Township High School on Monday, May 6, 2019.

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Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter

Fort Cherry’s Mara Whalen in the 100-meter dash during WPIAL Class AA Track & Field Championships at Peters Township High School on Monday, May 6, 2019.

McMURRAY – Outside of Ben Maxin’s office door at Fort Cherry High School hangs a sign with the well-known saying, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.”

The Fort Cherry girls track team, competing in its first district team championship, knew numbers weren’t on its side coming in. In the events the Rangers were good at, they had to be great in Monday, and that still might not be good enough.

Sometimes, especially in team track, size in numbers does make a huge difference.

Despite Fort Cherry cleaning up in its strongest events, depth proved to be too much of a factor Monday afternoon as the Rangers finished in fourth place at the WPIAL Class AA Girls Track & Field Team Championships at Peters Township High School.

Fort Cherry lost to eventual champion South Park, 95-55. The Rangers also lost to runner-up Mohawk, 87-63, and third-place finisher Shenango 88.5-60.5.

Both South Park and Mohawk pulled away in the field events. South Park swept every throwing event and the pole vault, with Mohawk swept the jumping events.

“Our kids competed hard today,” Maxin said. “We are putting a lot of the same kids in most of the events, which makes it hard on them. We only had two kids in the field events, so we struggled there because the other teams had three. But our kids battled.”

Mara Whalen won both the 400 and 800 runs, blowing away from the rest of the field. Whalen won the 400 in 59.95 seconds, less than one second shy of a personal best and more than a second and a half faster than the second-place finisher. In the 800, Whalen finished in 2:23.48.

“This year was more mental than physical for me,” Whalen said. “I’ve been working on bettering my mindset, focusing on myself rather than the girls next to me. I’ve been so much more successful worrying about myself than everybody else. I just say it’s going to hurt but will be worth it in the end. It’s better for me to get out front than push in the final 100 meters in either race.”

The most successful race for the Rangers was the 300-meter hurdles. McKenzie Faure finished in first place (47.47), a state-qualifying time, and Jadyn Hartner finished right behind in second place less than a half a second later (47.85).

The 300 hurdles splits the 400 and 800 runs, which gave Fort Cherry three consecutive wins.

“(Mara) has been doing that all year,” Maxin said. “She has been winning races and making it look easy. Doing the 400 and 800 is tough because only the 300 separates them. Then what McKenzie and Jadyn did was cool. That was fun watching them dominate and move up in the rankings together.”

Two events Maxin wanted Fort Cherry to “flex its muscles” on were the 3,200 relay and the 1,600 relay, the first and last events of the meet, respectively.

The Rangers won the 3,200 relay in 10:22.39 to start the meet, bettering the next closest team by more than seven seconds. Whalen, who returned in the 1,600 relay, took the final handoff at the same time as South Park and Mohawk and pulled away for a victory with a school-record time of 4:08.11.

“We knew going into the 3,200 we had enough strong legs that we didn’t need Mara,” Maxin said. “They won it and ran a (personal record) without her. That’s one thing we wanted to do well on was relays. We wanted to flex our muscles going into next week’s (WPIAL Individual Championships).

“Just because it was our first time here, they couldn’t just be happy that we were here,” Maxin continued. “We wanted to show them what we got. Our top performers in each event did what they could to put on a respectable showing.”

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