Crawley collected their sixth team victory in the Sussex U15 League final at Brighton’s Withdean Stadium on Friday evening.
Despite the holidays still making it difficult for teams to field their best teams it proved an excellent evening of good class competition and enthusiasm.
As far as the team results was concerned it was a case of deja vu as the Crawley team led for most of the evening and totalled 439 points to Chichester’s 367 and Brighton & Hove’s 356 with Horsham taking fourth place with 322 points.
Ivo Pitts from Crawley broke the only individual League record when he threw the javelin 48.74m while a strong Eastbourne girl’s quartet set a new mark in the 4 x 300m relay in 2:56.3s.
Crawley all rounders Abigail Packham and Poppy Oliver both completed hat tricks of victories with Packham taking the 75m hurdles in 11.6s, the high jump at 1.58m and a B victory in the 100m in 13.3s. Oliver, who has been showing cracking form of late won the B 75m hurdles in 11.7s and completed and impressive hard fought sprint double where she beat County 100m champion Ruby Anning (Brighton & Hove) 13.0s to 13.1s in the short sprint and 26.3s to 26.6s in the 200m, both cracking races.
There were some good battles in the field events with probably the Boys long jump proving the closest as Horsham’s Tom Gilsenan-Best proving victorious leaping 5.43m, just one centimetre ahead of Sam Dunstall (Lewes) who had beaten him in the 100m 12.0s to 12.2s while Dunstall had also finished second in the 200 metres to Pyers Lockwood (Eastbourne) who clocked 24.5s while Dunstall had to fight off Gilsenan-Best for second place as both were timed at 24.8s.
Lockwood also won the 300m in 37.8s and club mate Molly Swingler won the girls 300m in 42.7s.
Competition was very much the name of the game and all the distance races produced great battles apart from the girls 1500m when League record holder Lois Dooley (Brighton & Hove) broke clear virtually from the start and finished nearly the length of the straight clear in 4:53.7sec.