CHAPEL HILL– For the first time, North Carolina High School Athletic Association member schools will be competing for state championships in three different classifications of indoor track, scheduled for Friday and Saturday.
There will now be separate championships for both the 3-A and the 4-A schools, with 1-A and 2-A competing together. Indoor track began in 1987 as an open championship, and then a 4-A separate meet was held for the first time in 2007, with 1-A/2-A/3-A all competing together at that time.
For the second year in a row, the championships will be held at JDL Fast Track in Winston-Salem.
JDL Fast Track, one of the premier indoor track and field facilities in the Southeast, is the brainchild of two former Wake Forest University runners and current real estate developers, David Shannon and Craig Longhurst, who identified and fulfilled a need for an area indoor track facility for use by colleges, high schools, local track clubs and youth track organizations.
The privately owned, dedicated indoor track and field facility, which opened in January of 2012, houses a 200-meter oval track with a Mondotrack FTX surface—the same surface used at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Field event areas include two pole vault runways, two long/triple jump runways, one high jump apron and one throws area. The facility also includes a 100-meter warm-up track, office and meeting-room space, a training room, and hospitality suites for coaches’ or conference officials’ meetings at large events.
“The North Carolina indoor state high school meet was one of our early targets when we initially started discussing the project to build an indoor track,” said David Shannon, owner of JDL Fast Track.
This year’s meets will start with the 3-A championships on Friday. Competition will begin at 4 pm.
On Saturday, the 1-A/2-A meet is scheduled to start at 9 am. After that meet, 4-A schools hold their championships, with both field events and running events beginning at 3:30 p.m.
Last year Burlington Cummings took the men’s team title in the 1-A/2-A/3-A class with West Carteret winning on the women’s side. Cummings had also taken the women’s crown in five of the six previous championships prior to last year. Knightdale has won or shared the last three 4-A men’s titles while Raleigh Wakefield took the women’s title in 2013 for the third year in a row.