Alan Mosca has seen a lot in his time coaching the Bangor track and field team. But he’s never seen a championship like the one the Bangor girls brought home on Wednesday.
That’s because the state title was actually supposed to be decided days ago. Then bad weather and wet conditions kept pushing that final result back again and again.
The Class A state track championship meet was originally set for Saturday. And then, like so many sporting events this spring season, a dreary forecast got in the way. After a quick reshuffling of times and locations, the Class A, B and C meets were all rescheduled for Tuesday.
But instead of traveling across the river to Brewer as first planned, the Rams had to head all the way to Lewiston for the rescheduled meet.
That was just the beginning.
Though the Bangor girls ended Tuesday night at the top of the leaderboard, their quest for a fourth state title in five years wasn’t quite over. Wet conditions in the high jump area saw that event postponed for yet another day, as WABI reported. So a group of Rams athletes had to turn around and go back to Androscoggin County — this time to Auburn — for a second straight day to finish out the title pursuit.
“I have never seen a state meet like this,” Mosca said Wednesday evening. “Nothing like this, basically a three-day event.”
The only comparable situation he could recall happened at a Penobscot Valley Conference meet that he estimated was 16 or 17 years ago when the pole vault competition had to be rescheduled because of safety.
Mosca said that every state championship is special in its own right.
“And I think the unique story about this one was we had to wait an extra day, we had to go down and compete,” Mosca said.
And on top of that extra day this week, the team already had to quickly adjust its pre-meet preparation when the Friday announcement went out rescheduling Saturday’s event to Tuesday.
“What we did was we turned around and practiced Saturday morning,” Mosca said. “And the kids never grumbled, never complained, and I’m just very proud and I’m very impressed by their poise and maturity that they showed.”
He was “beyond proud” of what he described as an all-around effort from the whole team.
And it wasn’t a done deal on Wednesday, either. Despite a fairly comfortable point margin after all the other events, Mosca said it was still mathematically possible for the Bangor girls to fall out of first place.
“Going into the event we were up 17.75 points,” Mosca said, explaining that zero points for Bangor and first and second place finishes for Scarborough in the high jump would have meant 18 points — and an unlikely come from behind win.
Scarborough’s Isabella Harmon did in fact win the high jump. But a clutch sixth place performance from Gwen Bushnell earned some critical points and helped keep the lead out of reach.
“She wasn’t seeded to score, and, you know, it got called yesterday early in the meet and then she sat around,” Mosca said about Bushnell’s multi-day wait to participate in the high jump. “And then she went and took two very hard finals this morning, jumped in the bus and a bunch of kids came down with us and we watched her jump. And she did great.”
Mosca emphasized that he was proud of Bushnell and the entire team for bringing home another state championship.
“We scored in 10 of the 19 events,” Mosca said about that across-the-board effort.
“We were diverse in our scoring,” he added.
Every member of the team competed hard and the Rams saw a host of personal bests at the state meet, Mosca said. And they did it despite a heavy travel schedule that included heading up to Aroostook County a week ago for the Penobscot Valley Conference championship.
“I think we put on more miles than anybody in the state in the last two weeks, because we went to Caribou last week, and then we’ve gone to Lewiston yesterday and Auburn today,” Mosca said. “We’ve definitely got our frequent flyer miles.”
