Rocky Hansen '23 had a genuine look of disbelief on his face Friday night.
The good kind of disbelief, upon learning that he had just run the third-fastest 1,600 meters in state history.
Video of Rocky’s reaction got thousands of views on social media over the weekend and the overall performance by Christ School track’s distance corps has had people talking, too. Elite competition brought out the best in the Greenies – all six runners that traveled to the Carolina Distance Carnival at Weddington High School came back with personal records.
With fans lined along the final 100 meters, Rocky kicked it in to win the 1,600 in 4 minutes, 2.88 seconds. The all-time state record is 4:02.55, which was run 10 years ago by Winston-Salem Reagan's Craig Engels, who was in attendance at Friday's meet.
Rocky's time is an all-time state record for juniors. Overall, he is historically No. 3 in North Carolina behind Engels and a 2018 race by Winston-Salem Mount Tabor’s Cameron Ponder (4:02.83).
Dawson Reeves '24 ran the state's second-best time ever for a sophomore (4:12.88) Friday and broke his own Christ School record in the 800-meter run (1:54.19) earlier in the evening.
Personal-record times were logged by four more Greenies in the 1,600 – Jackson Burch ’22 (4:20.75), Luke Parrish ‘24 (4:29.04), Jack Cross ’22 (4:40.12), and Will Peeler ‘23 (4:42.85).
The current strength of Christ School’s distance corps is without precedent. Consider this, the former school record in the 1,600 meters (4:30.97) had stood for 14 years until it was broken for the first time by Dawson last spring. The Greenies are coached by Randy Ashley, a former two-time qualifier for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.
Ondrej Szkandera ’23 was in Matthews, N.C. to document Friday's meet with photos. More of Ondrej’s pictures can be found at this link.