Netters:
The weirdest fast HS 400M I ever saw came at the New Jersey (now
Eastern) Relays back in 1984 at Toms River South HS. Only now, 18 years
later, have I learned the rest of the story in a conversation with Al
Jennings, Trenton HS coach, at the recent National HS meet in Raleigh.
That night in 1984, Trenton was involved in a girls' 1600R event,
the closing one on the program. The Tornadoes were trailing badly when their
star runner, Wendy Vereen, took the stick
Now Wendy was then one of the top HS sprinters in the country, but
she simply hated to run the 400. As I learned in raleigh, she hated it so
much that she actually disappeared before the event began, only to finally
emerge from the team bus and get to the starting line just in time,
She then proceded to run a 53-second anchor, but in her own
particular way, the first 200 in a pedestrian 30 seconds, at which point she
turned on the juice, ran the second 200 in 23 and flew past the rest of the
field to win the race.
Wendy went on, of course, to a very respectable coillege (at Morgan
State) and open career, running on a number of fast 400R teams for the U.S.
But her hatred (or fear) of the 400 robbed her of what could have been a
truly specacular career in the 400M and, even more, in the 400H, an event
she never did run. (She had run a 13.7 100H in HS and still holds her school
and county record in that event.
Her diminutive size (and "unaugmented" physique) limited her
individual success in the sprints, but her ability to carry her speed over
the longer 400 distance and her smooth running style would have made her a
natural for the 400 hurdles. To give an idea of what she might have
accomplished, a N.J. contemporary, Nadeen Bridgeforth (Temple U.) reached
the semi-finals of the Olympic Trials in 1988 with a 56+ clocking; Wendy
would have left her "in the dust" at any distance thru 400 meters and was at
least ghalf a second faster over the 100H.
Proof that she get better the longer the distance was is that, while
she stands only 2nd on the NJ all-time HS list for 100 meters (to Michele
Glover), her 22.99 200 still leads the lists by almost half a second.
Ed
Grant
