By JASON KING
Leader sportwriter
T.J. Bertrand of Cabot and Kristen Celsor of Searcy were the big winners at the state track meets over the weekend.
Bertrand followed up his victory at the 7A Central meet last week with a state title in the shot put at the 7A meet at Conway on Saturday.
Celsor, last year’s runner up in the heptathlon, won both the 300-meter hurdles and the high jump, and earned a third place in the 100-meter hurdles to lead Searcy to a seventh place finish at Lake Hamilton.
Celsor ran a time of 41.13 seconds in the 300-meter hurdles and cleared a distance of 5-4 in the high jump to claim the win in each event.
Bertrand threw a distance of 50 feet, three inches to claim the state title in the event, 11 inches better than that of the second-place finisher from Rogers High School. Brendan Tucker was second in the 3,200-meter run with a time of 9:39.66, less than two seconds off the winning pace of Catholic’s Alex Tully.
Both Cabot teams had top 10 finishes in the team results. The Panthers finished sixth overall, while the Lady Panthers took 10th.
Grant Pierce had the only other top-five performance for the Cabot boys with a fourth-place finish in the discus with a throw of 133-8. The Panther relay team finished third in the 3,200-meter and fifth in the 1,600 meter.
Senior Lady Panther Reilly McAtee finished third in the 800-meter run with a time of 2:23.92, and also was fifth in the 1,600-meter run with a time of 5:11.73. Ariel Voskamp, who will compete in the heptathlon for Cabot next week, finished second in the pole vault by clearing 11-0, four inches off the winning mark by Rea McKinley of Conway.
In the 5A state meet, North Pulaski’s Claire Crews finished fifth in the 1,600-meter run with a time of 5:37.77, while the Beebe boys relay team finished fifth in the 3,200-meter relay event with a time of 8:45.56.
