R-C Sports Notebook: With no home, track & field teams heading into final stretch

Coming off an exceptional weekend in Chico, Calif., the Douglas High School track and field team has quietly turned itself into the darkhorse candidate to win a team regional championship.

The bonus is that it could be either the girls' or boys' team that ends up accomplishing the task.

The relay squads on both sides are solid with depth and talent and the jumpers on the whole are possibly the best top to bottom group in the state.

The sprinters have been electric and the distance runners have steadily been approaching the front of the pack.

But all that being said, the team faces one more rather large hurdle heading into the final stretch of the season.

With work commencing on the all-weather track surface, the team is heading back out to the school's soccer field for the final month of the season.

It's nothing new to the veterans on the team, who practiced out there all season last year, but nonetheless, it's just one more step the team will have to overcome to acheive its goal.

The way this particular program has responded to adversity over the last several years, however, there's no reason to believe they won't take this latest bump perfectly in stride.

When head coach Rick Brown showed up at the school four years ago, he fielded a team of less than 30 athletes and was constantly having to juggle and shuffle just to field a full compliment of relay teams at any given meet.

This year, having started the season out with more than 100 athletes, Brown is facing the new challenge of shuffling seats around in the bus just so he can fit more athletes to take on the road with him.

It's not just the numbers that have improved.

This week, Brown spoke of traveling to out-of-state competitions and coming away just barely tipping the bottom third of the team standings in previous seasons.

This year, the case is much different.

"It's so nice to hear Douglas being mentioned in the top 15 or 20 of these big events," Brown said. "The kids have really risen to the challenges facing them and coming together at the right time."

The new track is tentatively scheduled for completion at about the same time whatever athletes that qualify for the state championships will be coming back home from Las Vegas.

Here's hoping that will cap the celebration to something much bigger.

Whatever anonymous Carson students that decided to come down and paint a large white "C" on the Douglas baseball infield Friday night learned a hard lesson that similarly anonymous Douglas students had to learn 10 years ago.

On the eve on the annual Carson-Douglas football game in 1997, a group of Douglas students trucked up the C hill in north Carson and changed the "C" to a "D".

The Senator football team came out the next day and beat Douglas 35-30.

Upon finding the "C" Saturday morning, the Tiger baseball promptly went out and thumped the Senators 15-5 in five innings and then came back in game two to take a 5-4 win on a late Willie Morgan single with two runners on.

Douglas improved to 9-0 at home on the year with the wins.

If there's any lesson to be learned here " and let's hope there is " it's that there is simply too much fire in this rivalry already for anyone to give the other school more motivation than what already exists.

Adding to the flame seems to always burn the offending party.

The Lady Tiger softball team has made a rather remarkable turn-around in the last three weeks.

With the series win against Carson and the sweep of Wooster, Douglas is suddenly looking favorably at second place, rather than just sneaking in on the last weekend, like last season.

Credit part of that to first-year coach Andy Mitchell's attention to the fundamentals. Give the offense its due for making the most of its opportunities on base and you simply can't ignore the much-improved defense.

The biggest difference, however, has been that in the last month something clicked with primary starter, sophomore Stephanie Harper.

In the last seven games, Harper went from a steady 43 strikeouts and 39 walks over 17 games (an average of 2.5 strikeouts and 2.2 walks per game) to 79 strikeouts and 52 walks for the year.

The bump up was created by an average of 5.1 strikeouts per game and just 1.8 walks per game during that stretch.

Harper is currently 15-5 on the year, which makes her the winningest single-season pitcher at Douglas in at least the last four years " a stretch that included standout hurlers Brittany Puzey, Kayla Dunn and Kellei Kizer.

Here's the kicker. As of the writing of this column, there are still eight games left in the regular season for the Lady Tigers.

Willie Morgan, sr., baseball and Taylor Biaggi, soph., track and field. Morgan belted the game-winning single Saturday afternoon against Carson and had four RBIs on the day. Biaggi won the open 3,200 at Chico, knocking more than 40 seconds off her previous best.