It was bronze, silver, gold for the Vernon Lions track team Thursday evening at the Class 3A State Track & Field Meet in Austin. The Lions qualified for the state meet in three events and came home with medals in all three. Vernon also picked up a silver medal as the Class 3A State Champion Runner-up in the team standings.
For Vernon athletes, action started early Thursday afternoon as Lady Lion Key’Maria McBride competed in the Triple Jump. On her third jump, the sophomore hit her best jump of the season 37-feet, 10-inches, which is a new Vernon school record, beating the old record by 1 inch. That old record was just set last month by McBride. While she didn’t medal, McBride did place at the state meet, finishing sixth.
The first Lion on the track was Case Fleming in the 100-Meter Dash. The junior had a time of 10.83 seconds and that was good enough to capture third place and the bronze medal. He held on for the bronze by just .02 hundredths of a second.
Following Fleming onto the track was Jackson Aydelott. The sophomore came into the state meet with the fastest time among the qualifiers in the 400-Meter Dash, but fell just short of gold. Aydelott clocked a time of 48.58 seconds to take the silver medal. The winning time was 48.12 seconds and was turned in by a runner from Crane who Aydelott edged out for first place at the Region 1 Meet.
The last group to take the track for the Lions was the 1600-Meter Relay team of Ty Scott, Kameron Plyler, Julius Dawkins and Aydelott. They had the fastest time heading into the state meet and all they did was shave almost 2 seconds off that time and captured the gold medal and state title with a time of 3-minutes, 18.94-seconds.