Two school records were broken and a new mark was set by East Hampton High’s girls track team at the Ocean Breeze Holiday Festival meet on Staten Island last week.
“These multi-state meets are mayhem, and, for a lot of our girls it was their first time,” Yani Cuesta, East Hampton’s coach, said. “It was a long day too, but it was well worth it because these kinds of meets give our girls a chance to compete at a high level, and to excel.”
East Hampton’s 4-by-800 and distance medley (1,200, 400, 800, and 1,600) relay teams broke school records, and in each case at least one of the runners was not on fresh legs. With their time of 10:03.12, the 4-by-8 team of Greylynn Guyer, Dylan Cashin, Sara O’Brien, and Ryleigh O’Donnell “crushed the previous record of 10 minutes and 48.15 seconds that Hannah Jungck, Alyssa Bahel, Devon Brown, and Dana Cebulski set in 2014,” Cuesta said.
And this despite the fact that O’Donnell, who had run the 800 less than an hour earlier in 2:22.85, good for 12th place among 23 competitors, was not on fresh legs. Her time set the school’s standard in the event, East Hampton girls not having contested the indoor 800 before.
Cuesta said she was “super proud” of that team, and credited her assistant, Nick DeLuca, with having been the first to see that the girls had it within them to break the school record.
The distance medley relay team of Guyer, Melina Sarlo, O’Brien, and Cashin also broke a school record that day, finishing fifth in 13:29.03, “even though they were not on fresh legs,” Cuesta said. The eclipsed record of 13:41.92, she said, was set by Cashin, Sarlo, Riley Miles, and O’Donnell in 2022.
Sarlo, “one of those all-around athletes like Meredith Spolarich that you rarely see anymore,” Cuesta said, finished 16th among 124 entrants in the shot-put with a season-best heave of 29 feet 7 inches.
“As I said earlier in this report, the day was long,” said Cuesta. “We left the high school at 9:55 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m. But it was fruitful.”
“Everything revs up from here. We’ll see how we move forward in large schools and in League III. We’re new to both.”
At the large schools Jim Howard meet on Dec. 20, O’Donnell was second in the 600-meter race, in 1:41.07, and, in the 1,500, Cashin finished third in 5:08.54, and Guyer fourth in 5:14.40.
Cuesta said she was proud of the six girls — Bennett Greene, Sophia Figueroa, Harper Craig, Kiera Martin, Nayive Chapa, and Grace Gomolka — who were new to the event. “Many were scared to run the distance because they’d been competing in the 55 and/or in the 300. They did well considering. As much as we try to explain to them how to run the 600, they don’t get it until they run it.”
Sarlo, Vicky Chen, Sam Ruano, Shirley Jiang, Lily Remy, Angie Castillo, Ali Munoz, and Lili Tubatan ran in the 55, and while none placed, Sarlo, Chen, Remy, and Castillo ran personal-best times. Castillo also competed in the 1,500-meter racewalk. “She has a good groove. I and Coach DeLuca were excited to see her consistency in each lap. She’s strong. We just need to get her to pick up her pace even more and she’ll be on the leaderboard.”
Cuesta and DeLuca entered a number of their distance runners — O’Donnell, Sarlo, O’Brien, and Cashin among them — in the 300, “providing them with the speed work that they need. . . . We love to see their eyes light up when they realize that they can do what we, the coaches, think they can do.”