GRANITE CITY – Six event wins went a long way for Edwardsville in Friday’s Granite City Invitational track meet at Memorial Stadium/Kevin Greene Field, two of them coming from A.J. Epenesa in the discus throw and shot put and another from freshman Jack Pifer in the 3,200 meters as the Tigers won the team championship with 138 points to outdistance second-place Cahokia, who had 99 points.
Mascoutah was third with 97 points, Marion fourth with 88 points and Belleville West rounded out the top five with 61 points. Other area teams represented were Alton (sixth with 52 points), the host Warriors (seventh with 45 points), Jersey (ninth with 30 points) and Triad (12th with 16.5 points).
Epenesa’s event-winning discus throw was a meet record at 204-1, which topped Epenesa’s 2016 record mark of 193-9 by 10 feet, four inches; Epenesa also took the shot put with a toss of 53-8.
“We gave some guys some different events to work with,” said Tiger coach Chad Lakatos. “We were strong in the throws, had a good place to long (jump) and triple (jump) in Granite – we did decent there. Kenneth Bond had a decent long jump; anytime you go over 20 feet in Granite, you’re doing pretty good.
“It was a good, solid team performance – it’s a situation where we see where we are at this point; being able to play around with a couple of relays is kind of nice, so it was a good meet for us.”
The Tigers’ 4×800, 4×100 and 4×200 relays all took wins on the day, with Franky Romano, Jacob Schoenthal, Roland Prenzler and Sam McCormick making up the 4×800 relay team, Dionte Rodgers, DeVonte’ Tichner, Travis Anderson and Kendall Abdur-Rahman on the 4×100 team and Tichner, Darryl Harland, Anderson and Abdur-Rahman on the 4×200 team. Pifer covered the 3200 meters in 10:12.73.
Bruce Wachowski finished third in the disc with a 163-7 toss and fifth in the shot at 163-7; Bond was third in the long jump at 20-2.5 while Blake Neville turned in a second in the pole vault at 11-6. Prenzler was fourth in the 1,600 in 4:38.25 while Harlan took third in the 200 at 23.29 seconds.
The Tigers are back in action at home in the Winston Brown Invitational meet beginning at 10 a.m. April 22.
