SEQUIM — The moment came with little fanfare. Four Sequim High School athletes clad in purple and gold — Taryn Johnson, Anastasia Updike, Macy Cogburn and Rileigh VanDyken — circled the rutted, broken track for one circuit each, finishing the 4×400 relay about 20 seconds faster than their counterparts from Port Angeles to end the Olympic League meet.
For the next three years, other than some sporadic practices and occasional use by various groups, the SHS track has been unused.
Last week, however, crews from Oregon-based Beynon Sports put the finishing touches on a new track surface, the culmination of a project that will allow Sequim’s high school and middle school track teams to once again host meets and for its athletes to train with lessened chance of injury.
“We needed this track resurface and we needed it bad,” Sequim High track and field coach Brad Moore said. “I’m super stoked that it’s there. I’ve going by every few days to see how it’s coming along.”
Moore, who’s led the SHS track and field squads for the past 30 seasons, said the last time the track was resurfaced was 1996. Manufacturers recommend replacement every 10 years, Moore wrote district officials two years ago.
Since then, large ruts and breaks in the track — made up mostly of ground up, compacted tires — began to surface.
“On the east side straightaway [in particular], the separation had gotten really obvious,” Moore said, recalling a conversation in 2021 with assistant B.J. Schade to shut down the possibility of hosting any more meets for the safety of Sequim and visiting athletes.
“I’ve patched a few [holes] over the years, but … I think we’ve got to be done,” Moore said.
Since 2021, coaches and athletes have pushed for resurfacing, and Moore credits former superintendent Robert Clark for putting the project back on the district’s radar and particularly current superintendent Regan Nickels for making it more of a priority on the Capital Projects Levy schedule, using funds voters approved in 2021 for various districts projects.
“I think for a long time it was a can easily kicked down the road,” Moore said. “Regan was very determined to make it happen.”
The old track surface, which crews completed demolition of on July 15, is being replaced with the new surface that will cost the district $363,299, while a secondary project — removal and replacement of a pole vault runway that for years was situated close to a concrete wall — cost $39,074, according to Nickels and Mike Santos, director of facilities, operations and security.
A project to replace the stadium lights will cost about $85,000 in the Capital Project Levy, district officials said.
Crews dug up a massive amount of track material, Santos said at a school board meeting in mid-July, and the finishing touches — striping of the lanes, are set to occur this week, Nickels said.
“We will be having a ribbon-cutting ceremony, though the event details are under development,” she said in an email.
The track will be open for public use at some point, she added, but that date has not been determined.
Adjustments
Moore said track coaches and their athletes made adjustments to the deteriorating track surface at the Sequim stadium.
Runners would spend limited time on the track, doing runs off campus at venues such as Robin Hill County Park.
“We’d do our best to keep them off the track [but] the grass field is not great there either, not terribly flat or level,” Moore said.
SHS coaches began laying down strips of padded material called rollout runways on the track’s straightaways to give sprinters at least some repetitions. The pads have drawbacks, however.
“When you’re running 200 intervals, 300 hurdles, you have to run curves, and those [pads] don’t turn really well,” Moore said. “They’re not ideal, and eventually they start to break down. This year chunks ripped off.”
Sequim coaches also started sending some of their athletes to train on Port Angeles’ track. The complication with that situation, Moore said, is that athletes from different schools using the same facility at the same time would be counted as a competition, of which schools are limited during a season.
That meant sending Sequim athletes to the Port Angeles track after the Roughriders’ practices ended at 6 p.m. (One SHS quartet made the best of that schedule: Kaitlyn Bloomenrader, Eve Mavy, Riley Pyeatt and Hi’ilei Robinson raced to a national title at the Nike Outdoor Nationals in 2022 despite not being able to practice their event at their home stadium.)
Some Sequim runners started developing shin splints so coaches would send them to the nearby Sequim YMCA facility to do running drills in the pool or use their stationary bikes.
More than half of the freshmen Moore saw in the past couple of seasons developed shin splint issues. Many of those runners did train as middle schoolers on the same track, but the high school season is at least twice as long, Moore said.
“It’s a much longer grind,” he said. “It was pretty tough on them.”
Moore said one student-athlete who was an injury casualty of the track was Tyler Mooney, a 2022 SHS grad who came out of his senior season and posted strong, state competition-worthy times in the 400-meter race early in the season. But he developed foot injuries — and slower 400 times — as the season wore on.
“He most likely would have medaled at state except the surface we were on kept him from doing it,” Moore said. “Had he been healthy the whole season, he probably would have broken our school record [in the 400].”
A silver lining: Mooney kept up with track and now competes at Washburn University (Kansas) in sprints and middle distances.
Moore also suspects the poor track conditions have also led to lower turnout numbers.
At the urging of parents, athletes and coaches, the school district in recent months formed a committee to look at athletic facility improvements, starting specifically with the track and the stadium.
Committee members looked at various scenarios that would improve the playing surface at the stadium that hosts boys and girls soccer games and football games for multiple age levels, as well as other improvements. For example, Sequim’s stadium does not meet league, district or state requirements (artificial turf, a covered stadium) to host postseason games.
But those improvement costs reach into the $2.4 million to $5 million range, district officials noted in a June school board meeting.
“The money is not there … and there’s no prospect of it coming in,” Moore said.
“If this [resurfacing] is what we can do and we can still host meets. Is it ideal? No. [But it’s] a good surface to train on. I can live with that.”
________
Michael Dashiell is the editor of the Sequim Gazette of the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which also is composed of other Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News and Forks Forum. Reach him at michael.dashiell@sequimgazette.com.
