YAIAA athletes win 9 medals on Day 2 at PIAA track and field championships

An hour before competition started, Shippensburg University Seth Grove Stadium seats were empty. The infield and track, usually bustling with athletes, coaches and officials making final preparations for the PIAA track and field championships, had limited activity. Infield tents and the stadium bowels were filled with people trying to stay dry for as long as possible.

While high jump and pole vault moved inside Heiges Fieldhouse, the rest of the competition was held in a steady rain with temperatures that never climbed above 50 degrees. Some athletes, like Spring Grove’s Ella Bahn and Andrew Gerber, prefer cooler temperatures over the traditional heat of Memorial Day weekend. Others, like Dallastown’s Leah Navarro, felt every bit of the cold.

“It was pretty tough,” Navarro said after finishing 20th in the Class 3A 3200 meters to open the day’s competition. “It was worse than I thought because I knew it was going to rain, but I didn’t think it was going to be this cold and windy. It was so cold you could feel it in your muscles.

” New Oxford’s Brayden Billman, who competed in the Class 3A long jump Saturday after finishing second in the triple jump the day before, said it wasn’t so much the rain or cold that were the problems, it was what the rain did to the sand he was jumping into. “We were warming up and everyone was jumping into the sand, it got all compact,” he said. “You hit it, then you bounce again coming off it.