Penn Relays: Bad exchange costs Chiefs in 4X800 final
 
Jon Blau, Correspondent

PHILADELPHIA — Standing on Franklin Field’s turf after finishing Cherokee’s first leg of the 4x800 meter championship Saturday, Colin Merrigan watched as each wave passed the baton to the next.

Merrigan had kept pace with the fastest in the field, as mandated by his coaches, and Shawn Wilson blew past the rest to take the lead for the Chiefs — as their coaches instructed. If Cherokee was going to have any shot at winning this race against anchors capable of 1:53 in two laps, the Chiefs’ evenly spread quartet of 1:55 splits needed to have the lead.

Heading into the last leg, Merrigan looked through a crowd of exiting No. 3 runners and thought he saw Ross Staudt handing the baton to Drew Viscidy with a shot at the lead. But through the traffic blocking his eyes, Viscidy didn’t reappear.

Viscidy sat behind the pack, the baton on the ground. The race had been dropped on the track before the fourth leg could begin.

The pack raced ahead of the Chiefs and left them behind; in the end, Cherokee (7:49.85) would finish ninth in a field led by Westfield (Chantilly, Va.) in 7:39.73. Last year, when the Chiefs dreamed of just qualifying for the 4x800 final at the Penn Relays, a sub-7:50 time might have sufficed.

Not now. Not after this team came in No. 2 at nationals during the indoor season. They were the first Cherokee team to qualify for the 4x800’s final heat since 1998, but that was not enough.

“This year, we went in and it was all business just getting into the championship,” Merrigan said. “I saw Ross giving it to Drew, but then I didn’t see Drew for a couple of seconds and I was like, ‘Ah, crap.’ We were in the race. It didn’t feel good.”

After splits of 1:56.5 by Merrigan, Wilson’s 1:55.2 and Staudt’s 1:57.7, Viscidy’s two laps took more than two minutes to complete.

At this point in their careers, coach Chris Callinan expects better than what he saw on the track at Penn. Pope John XXIII of Sparta, which finished fifth in 7:46.95, is a team Cherokee beat during the indoor season. The lead pack was not outside of their reach, if only the baton had been.

“It’s nice that they qualified, but we fully expected it,” Callinan said. “If we were an outside bubble team, we might have been excited, but we weren’t, because we’re not.

“We ran (7:43.64) at indoor nationals, and I think we’re in shape to run even faster than that. We still have to get it done first.”

Cherokee’s coaching staff knew this race would be a jumble coming in, because any team in the field of 12 had a chance to win under the right conditions. The first component of the Chiefs’ plan was for Merrigan to shoot to the lead, regardless of how much energy his opponents tried to expend to take it from him. Merrigan did his best to comply, battling from within a tight pack to start the race.

When he handed the baton to Wilson, the team’s lone underclassmen did the heavy lifting, pushing to the front, ahead of Kingston College (Jamaica). But during Staudt’s leg, Westfield made its charge, and it cemented its lead after Viscidy’s slip-up.

On the region’s biggest track stage, Cherokee failed to find its best time. With disappointment, however, Merrigan said he will find a reason to run even harder when the Chiefs travel to meets in their own backyard.

“We’ve done a lot of racing. Experience-wise, you aren’t going to get anything close to this in another race, with the crowd and everything,” Merrigan said. “Now that just fuels the fire. I want to go out and race more and show the people that we can run, seriously.”