Leading off today: St. Anthony's track and field phenom Walter Henning broke an eight-year-old U.S. high school record in the hammer throw Sunday with a toss of 255-11 at his school's invitational.
The old mark of 253-3 was set by Rhode Island schoolboy Jacob Freeman in 1999.
On Saturday, Henning won the shot put with a personal-best heave of 68-11 3/4, eclipsing the state record of 67-8 by Ed Ellis of Patchogue-Medford in 1982. (So much for my zero-gravity wisecrack last week.) Henning also had two other throws over 68 feet in the meet.
Pet peeve department: I say this with fingers crossed, but we may actually have a warm spring season that would allow track's elite to pop some times and distances.
The question is this: Will we be able to see the results online? It's very frustrating for track junkies, myself included, to be able to read stories filed by reporters at the meets but not be able to find the results online.
This weekend alone, there were too many instances of newspaper-operated web sites not finishing the job:
- The Times Union in Albany didn't attach agate to its Colonie Relays coverage.
- The Daily Messenger in Canandaigua and my own Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester mader the same mistake with the His & Her Invitational.
- Ditto for The Ithaca Journal's coverage of the Twisted Relays, which didn't include agate.
- The Utica Observer-Dispatch gave the same treatment to the Rome Free Academy Invitational.
- Any number of Central NY papers missed the boat on the Cayuga County Invitational.
- I'm not sure anyone had the Tri-Valley Relays; I couldn't find the meet mentioned anywhere other than TullyRunners.com
And this weekend was hardly atypical. Cross country, indoor track, outdoor track and wrestling frequently suffer from these errors of omission by newspaper web sites. And let's not even begin harping on the sites operated by other outlets such as TV stations or cable outlets with their own 24-hour news channels.
While I'm grateful to TullyRunners and a handfull of other outlets that do go the extra mile (or is that 1,600 meters?) to acquire and post the results, this is the type of information that the traditional media needs to be providing if they want to stay in the game.
