Hydel could challenge 4x400m record next year

With three straight wins at the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls' Athletics Championships (Champs), Hydel High School is the current queenpin of the 4x400m relay. The future is bright since each member of Corey Bennett's 2022 Penn Relay record wreckers is eligible to return to high school competition next year.

Hydel polished off a Gibson/McCook Relays-Champs-Penn Relays triple crown with Alliah Baker, Oneika McAnnuff, Kerrica Hill, and Brianna Lyston clocking 3:32.77 minutes. Looming in the distance is Vere Technical's world high school record of 3:30.51 minutes from the 2013 edition of Champs with Shericka Jackson aboard. Bennett knows his 2023 squad, enriched by possible returners, could make a run at the record.

"Nothing is guaranteed from one year to the next, but I think that once these girls remain healthy and stay motivated," he said before the thought morphed into praise for Hill, the sprinter-hurdler who clocked 54.4 seconds for the third leg at Penns. "Kerrica Hill ran on the 4x4 for the first time in her life," Bennett recalled, "and that's because (Central Champs 400 metre hurdles winner) Daena Dyer was hurt before Champs and I thought she did very well. On any given day, 54.4 is a very good split at the high school level. I think once she understands the event, she can split 52 or faster, because she's afraid of the event."

Hill tiptoed through the heats and got a word of advice from Bennett.

"I figured we would have a lead going into that third leg so she could step off the gas and then apply her natural speed," he said. "In the finals, all I asked her to do was just run a little more the first 30m and just do the same thing pretty much, and I thought the results were excellent."

With McAnnuff churning out sub-53 legs all season, 11.14, 22.53 sprinter Lyston slotted into the anchor leg role.

"Lyston has one of the greatest ranges I've seen in a schoolgirl of athletes in high school period," Bennett said. "She's not very far from Yohan Blake from St Jago, and Nickel Ashmeade, persons who could run from short to midrange."

Blake and Ashmeade who ran on all conquering Monk Street 4x100m and 4x400m sides in 2007 and 2008.

"Lyston doesn't train for the 400," Bennett said. "She trains for her sprints. She just has the ability and can run back-to-back 200s better than most."

That ability produced a winning 50.8 second split at Champs, and a 51.42 anchor at the Penn Relays.

That triumph was Hydel's third in the last four editions of the Philadelphia relay carnival. The next staging could see Hydel in pursuit of a Vere standard set by Jackson, Olivia James, Yanique McNeil and Andrenette Knight.