On Saturday, March 24th, the Bethpage Marine Fitness team visited Colts Neck High School in New Jersey for their second meet of the year.

Bethpage was surprisingly able to have an A-Team, a B-Team, and a C-Team each for boys and girls to compete, allowing everyone who went to the meet to compete. Despite this, the A-Teams are the only teams that count toward our placement.

Despite Colts Neck hosting the meet, the true competition for us at this meet was South Bronx. The schools that have proved to be tough competition for BHS are mainly South Bronx and Emmaus, and with Emmaus absent, South Bronx was the focus.

The events began with crunches, followed by push-ups, standing broad jumps, pull-ups, and then finally runs. The difference in setup by Colts Neck in their standing broad jumps and runs, proved to be difficult for our A-teams to adjust to, which in turn made our scores much less.

Sophomore Aidan Radcliffe said that the facts that Colts Neck didn’t use boards for our jumps, “lowered our scores a lot” along with the extra down and back in the runs.

With this in mind, it was very tense before and during the awards ceremony. The awards were given to the girls first, and our girls A-Team had placed first in the whole meet, with captain Erin Gonzalez placing first out of the girls overall, with the other A-Team girls placing behind her.

When the boys placements came around, we wondered if we could take two first places. Despite the great effort, the boys didn’t place first, but did place second, with all of the A-Team boys placing individually.

Senior Christian Menjivar said that he was “disappointed with the teams scores, as we were just a few points short of first place, but is excited to practice and improve for the next meets.”

Despite these struggles we still placed very high, with the boys placing second and the girls placing overall, making this a great meet for Bethpage.