The hurdles have brought Kate Campos and Jaida Rowe much closer. Quite literally, actually.
At last week's district track meet at Millard South — the girls 100-meter hurdles final having center stage — Campos and Rowe were side by side, and so close that their arms were touching with every leap.
It looked like Rowe, a Lincoln Southwest senior, may get this one, but Campos, a Lincoln Pius X junior, recovered late to win in 14.23 seconds. Rowe finished second at :14.25.
That close.
The race served as a possible preview of state, where Campos and Rowe are among the favorites in the 100 and 300 hurdle events in Class A.
Their district battle also served us this: The girls hurdle talent in the Capital City is really, really good.
"It's unbelievable," said Patrick Grosserode, who works with track athletes at his training facility, The TrackVille, and is an assistant coach at Pius X.
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If Penn State is Linebacker U in football, then Lincoln, Nebraska, is Hurdle High. At least in 2022, anyway.
Of the seven girls leading the state in the 100s this season, five are from Lincoln: No. 1 (Campos, :14.19), No. 2 (Rowe, :14.21), No. 3 (Lincoln Lutheran's Adrianna Rodencal, :14.24), No. 4 (Northeast's Laney Songster, :14.79) and No. 7 (Southwest's Taylor Schuster, :14.99).
What's more, three of them are on the all-time charts. In the 100 hurdles alone, Campos is third, Rowe is fourth and Rodencal is sixth. Campos is No. 2 all-time in the 300s.
Schuster is only a freshman and follows a line of talented Southwest hurdlers that has included Caelyn Christiancy, Joslyn Soucie and Katie Thompson.
As the season has progressed, Lincoln's top hurdlers have posted lower and lower times. They're peaking at the right time — Rodencal posted a career-best :14.24 in the 100s at districts last Thursday — and though they've been racing since March, the work began much sooner.
Campos, Rowe and Rodencal trained together at TrackVille over the winter, fine-tuning technique, developing race habits, working on starts and developing explosiveness.
The athletes couldn't run full races at TrackVille, but the workouts gave them a head start on the actual season.
"We didn't do much offseason training last year," Campos said, alluding to COVID-19 challenges, "and it definitely showed incorporating it this year."
The training helped a lot, Rowe said. Not only were the athletes learning technique in weekly themed increments put together by Grosserode, but they were working with Jay McConico, a former NCAA national runner-up from Iowa and now one of the top professional hurdlers in the U.S.
"What's interesting about these girls is that they're all very different hurdlers, and they all excel at different points of their race and of their technical," Grosserode said. "What's cool about them is I don't look at them as the same hurdler. We're always working on different things."
The winter workouts at TrackVille got competitive, Grosserode said, but friendly, too. Bonds were developed.
"It was awesome," said Rodencal, who is looking to defend her state titles in the 100s and 300s in Class C. "I went in there just wanting to make my hurdle times better and came out of there with some amazing friendships."
The hurdlers returned to their schools to create their own trails of success this spring. Rodencal reached the all-time charts at the Norris meet early in the season, and Rowe soon entered the charts, too.
With Rowe challenging, Campos posted some of the fastest times in state history at the Heartland Athletic Conference meet, winning the 100s in :14.19 and the 300s in :43.10, just 0.6 off a state record.
"I was running 15s, inconsistently 14s until Jaida came and now we're lower 14s, so obviously it's pretty big," Campos said.
Said Rowe, "It's definitely one of those things where I know I'm going to be running against Kate so I have to bring my best because I know I'm going to have someone to run with."
Rodencal competes in Class C, so she doesn't get a lot of opportunities to race against some of the best from Class A. Yet seeing what her city mates are doing has been motivating.
"The big thing this year is running for myself, but Kate running a :14.1 and Jaida running in the low :14.2s, it's always something that's pushing me even if I don't run against them," the Lincoln Lutheran senior said.
All three will take aim at all-class gold honors when the state meet begins Wednesday at Omaha Burke Stadium. Classes A and B will have the track the first two days, and Friday and Saturday will belong to Classes C and D.
The state meet is a showcase of Nebraska's best track and field athletes. No doubt, Lincoln has its share of competitors beginning with an elite group of hurdlers that could shake up the record books before the sun sets this week.
"I told the girls in the offseason there was no ceiling on this, for any of them," Grosserode said. "It's not surprising to me at all how fast that they're running and how fast that they're progressing."