The banked track of Virginia Tech’s Rector Field House brings out the best in North Carolina senior Tasha Stanley.
“The past three years, that’s where we’ve competed at ACCs,” Stanley said. “When I’m competing on that track, I just go hard because I remember that’s where the championships are held.”
That mindset led to promising performances from her and many other Tar Heels this weekend at the Hokie Invitational. Stanley won the women’s 600-meters by a full second and ran the second leg of North Carolina’s winning 4×400-meter team.
Sandi Morris, athlete of many hats, had a banner weekend as well. She improved her pole vault height by more than four inches to 13-5 3/4 — the eighth best height in the nation this season. Morris also placed fourth in the women’s 60-meter hurdles, two behind Danielle Brock, who took second in both the 60-meter hurdles and the 400-meter dash.
“Things went well for the first away meet of the year,” assistant head coach Josh Langley said. “The things we were focusing on this week, the kids executed well. We got some good performances out of it, and it’s great to come away healthy.”
But this weekend was most eye-opening for the team’s distance runners, who made the most of their first action since the cross country season ended. The Tar Heels swept the top three spots in the women’s 1,000-meters, an effort spearheaded by Ashley Verplank’s winning time of 2:52.92.
Sophomore Patrick Schellberg narrowly missed first place in the men’s event and was followed closely in third by teammate Jack Driggs.
“This is my first race since May, so I was pretty nervous going in,” said Schellberg, who did not compete in last fall’s cross country season. “I was really just hoping to gain some confidence off of the result.”
“We haven’t done any speed workouts, so doing as well as I did definitely gave me that confidence.”
