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Republished with permission granted by The Washington Newspaper Publishing Co. LLC d/b/a MediaDC. Back to Montgomery Journal articles
Fall derails Prep effort
3,200-meter team 7th at Penn Relays
By BENJAMIN LUMPKIN
Journal staff writer
Photo by Phil Masturzo. Caption: Georgetown Prep's Chris Neal (left) runs the anchor leg for the 3,200-meter relay team that placed seventh at the Penn Relays.
PHILADELPHIA
The Georgetown Prep 3,200-meter relay team might look back at the 97th Penn Relays and remember the fall they took in the Championship of America at the University of Pennsylvania's Franklin Field.
In an even stronger image they'll remember the fall of second runner Tom McPherson as he made the second turn - with the lead. It was after the fall that the Little Hoyas went from the front of the pack to the back in a matter of seconds.
The last two Prep runners, Bogi Yohannes and Chris Neal, got the Little Hoyas to seventh (8:00.24) in the 10-team race. Vere Tech of Jamaica won the event in 7:38.89.
McPherson was doing well after receiving the baton from Jama Bile, until he and Vere Tech runner Dudley Dawkins made contact.
"[Dawkins] ran on my heel," McPherson said. "He was kicking my heel, then when he was making his move I was making my move and he shoved his shoulder up into my arm. I don't think it was on pupose or anything. It was a tight turn. He shoved his shoulder into my arm, then his baton knocked my baton...then he knocked me down because I was going off-balance.
"Whether we would have won or not I can't say that. I don't think we would have won," McPherson said. "Our time wasn't anything near theirs in the qualifying. We probably wouldn't have won, but we wanted to run our best and it kind of hurts that."
Georgetown Prep qualified Saturday morning for the Championship of America with a time of 7:54.92, the ninth best of the 10 qualifiers. St. Jago of Spanishtown, Jamaica, had the top qualifying time (7:43.63). The Little Hoyas returned to run the big race Saturday afternoon, well after Raghib "Rocket" Ismail's last place finish in the 100-meter dash for Notre Dame.
"It was going real well," Neal said. "I thought it was a good race. It's very hard to run the preliminaries in the morning and come back in the afternoon."
Bile also ran in the high school boys 1500-meter championship and finished third (3:58.64). He tried to make something happen in the final lap to overcome winner Ibrahim Aden of Fork Union Military Academy (3:53.67) and second-place finisher Bryan Spoonire of Asbury Park, N.J. (3:54.39). But it just wasn't there.
Craig Lake of Walt Whitman High School was seventh in the girls 1,500-meter championship, finishing in 4:50.5. Pascal Dobert of Whitman was seventh in the boys 3,000 (8:43.89).
The Paint Branch 1,600-meter relay team of Orlando Leigh, Prentice Pollard, Mahamed Turay and Courtney Cumberbatch won its heat (3:35.55). Watkins Mills' 1,600 boys relay team was third in its heat (3:29.43) and Richard Montgomery sixth (3:37.15).
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