Heitkamp takes 14th

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Trevor Heitkamp had been dominant in distance races during the 2023 season.

He finished first in the 1,600-meter run every time he competed in it, up until the regional meet.

Despite his success, he wasn’t seeded to finish on the podium in the state championship.

Heitkamp ran a good race, but was simply outclassed.

Heitkamp’s time of 4 minutes, 27.62 seconds, earned 14th place in the 1,600 run Saturday during the OHSAA Division III Track and Field State Finals at Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University.

Also competing Saturday was the FRHS girls 4x100 relay team after qualifying for finals on Friday, when junior Mara Pearson finished as the long jump runner-up and the girls 4x800-meter relay team placed 13th.

Heitkamp outperformed his No. 16 seed.

“I’ll take it. I placed better than what I was ranked by (two places),” said Heitkamp, who was 13th in the state in the 3,200 run last season and has also made two trips to the cross country state finals. “This was probably one of the best finishes I’ve had at state. … Overall, I’m happy with it.

“I think this was the first year ever that I went to state and I placed better than what I was supposed to so that’s good.”

Heitkamp had a couple of goals set for this race. Primarily, he wanted to run a good time, and execute a solid race plan to put him in position to succeed with so many runners clumped up together in a pack.

He also set a goal of getting closer to the school’s record of 4:20 and to medal.

While Heitkamp didn’t achieve his loftier goals, he nailed the first two.

As part of his race plan, Heitkamp specifically wanted to avoid getting mixed into the pack of runners that were clumped together.

He succeeded in staying out of the pack by outpacing the group in the first two laps before they overtook and passed him in the third lap.

“I think my first half of my race was perfect,” Heitkamp said. “That’s something to build off of. … Building off of that experience, I think I’ve finally figured how to start a race at this caliber, and now I just need to focus on how to finish a race with all these people.”

After falling behind the pack in the third lap, Heitkamp was running against Matthew Lee of Ansonia, Thomas Franklin of Ottawa Hills and Will Negley of Mechanicsburg for 13th.

Coming down the final stretch of the race, Franklin held a lead over the other three athletes, while Negley was slightly in front of the other two. Heitkamp noticed Lee beginning to make a final push, and worked to keep pace with him. In the process, both passed Negley and Franklin as the group of four finished within a second of each other.

“I had this realization with 75 meters left that this is the rest of my season right here, and just did everything I could,” Heitkamp said.

The final result ended up being Lee in 13th (4:27.46), Heitkamp in 14th (4:27.62), Franklin in 15th (4:27.66) and Negley in 16th (4:28.43). Bryan Holland of East Canton won the race in 4:13.51 while Brayden Obrien of Reed Eastern earned the final state medal in eighth place at 4:21.69.

After climbing from the No. 17 seed to ninth place during Friday’s preliminaries to earn the last spot in the championship race, Saturday did not go smoothly for the Fort Recovery girls 4x100 relay team.

The Indians would have needed to beat only one team to overcome the odds and earn a state medal. They never had the chance, as they were disqualified for flinching off the block just before the gun sounded.

Despite the anticlimactic finish, FRHS coach Christy Diller found a positive note about how the team of Mara Pearson, Anna Roessner, Paige Guggenbiller and Kiana Matsuda was able to finish the season with their performance in the preliminary race.

“To be honest, they were not supposed to be here,” Diller said. “The way it turned out, they were going to have to run another school record to get on that podium. I’m not saying they couldn’t have done that, but it would have been a tall order two days in a row to do that.

“It’s fine. It happened. It’s a good learning experience and now we go out on a high from the race yesterday where we set a school record, and everything went as well as it could have gone.”

The Indians weren’t the only team to be disqualified, as Lake Center Christian School stepped outside of their assigned lane, disqualifying them from the event. That left seventh-placed Trinity’s time of 50.74 the slowest time, three hundredths of a second faster than Fort Recovery’s school record.

The Indians will return all four girls who were a part of the late-season relay team.

“We have really talented kids and it makes me really excited about our depth for next year,” Diller said. “These kids all come back and they all come back with the shared experience which is priceless for a relay team. It’s kind of a good place to be.”