We have reached the top three memorable moments for the Knoxville High School Athletic year, and today we head to the Blue Oval as the Panthers qualified five events as large entries. Ashlyn Finarty was a qualifier in the shot put while Ciara Heffron qualified in the discus, T.J. DeJong and Gavin Montalvo qualified in the long jump and the boys 4×800 meter relay also got in. While all five put forth a great effort, it was the 4×800 team that raised a few eyebrows and finished an outstanding 11th in class 3A. The team of Seth Walraven, Kaden McGill, DeJong, and Kaden Curry laid down a season best time of 8:22.70 and won their heat. All four were happy with how things went, especially only running the event a few times during the season.

“Everybody had a really good race, we put this together late in the season and it was a really good race. It’s always great to run here, and it’s a different experience from other track meets, and it was really cool to see the Jumpotron time and see our names on that when we won our heat. Coming into this winning out heat was our goal, and we wanted to show everyone that we can compete with the best teams in the state. It felt really nice being here and for a team that hadn’t done this race a lot it felt really good to run and be here.”

Finarty would go on to finish 13th in the shot with a distance of 37 feet two inches…Heffron would place 24th in the discus…Montalvo was 15th in the long jump with a leap of 20 feet 1.5 inches and DeJong was 18th in the long jump with a distance of 19 feet seven inches.