Buckeye boys defend home track, win Buckeye Relays behind record-setting 4x1600

Buckeye protected its home turf in impressive fashion Thursday night, winning the 12-team Buckeye Relays with 113 points behind a mix of sprint speed, distance strength and field-event depth. The Bucks set the tone early and kept adding to it throughout the meet at Buckeye High School, piling up first-place finishes and key points across nearly every discipline.

The headline performance came in the 4x1600, where Brady Salazar, Joe Stahl, Gavin Waibel and Dimitry Pshonyak delivered a school-record run of 19:05.78. The quartet not only claimed first place, it also broke the previous school mark by 16 seconds, a signature moment in a meet full of them. Buckeye also picked up relay victories in the 4x200, where Eddie Hondroudakis, Cael Miller, Brady Salazar and Brayden Bonnett won in 1:32.70, and in the 4x400, where Hondroudakis, Nolan Rieth, Waibel and Salazar finished first in 3:34.85.

Bonnett turned in one of the top individual efforts of the day, winning the 100-meter dash in 11.23. He also helped power the 4x100 team of Lucas Balaban, Miller, Hondroudakis and Bonnett to a runner-up finish in 45.53. Buckeye kept scoring in the distance relays as well, taking third in the 4x800 with Nolan Rieth, Brant Anderson, Waibel and Stahl finishing in 8:50.18, while John Galayda, Ben Naso, Nick Rieth and Pshonyak placed second in the distance medley relay with a time of 11:27.65.

The Bucks showed their range in the field events. The discus relay team of Jake Bally-Freiberg, Denis Shevchenko and Ashton McClellan took first, led by throws of 142 feet, 8 inches from Bally-Freiberg and 142-1 from Shevchenko. In the pole vault relay, Caden Fike cleared 12 feet and Lucas Vasel added a 10-6 vault as Buckeye finished second. The shot put relay also earned second behind Shevchenko's 46-2 throw, while Kyle Landes threw 37-10.5 and McClellan added 37-9. In the high jump relay, Andy Kost and Salazar each cleared 5-8, with Cael Miller adding 5-4 as the Bucks finished third.

More points followed from the long jump relay, which placed fourth behind jumps from Bonnett (17-5), Alex Plisko (16-8) and Hondroudakis (15-5). The shuttle hurdle relay team of Rhys Cielma, Plisko, Brayden Russo and A.J. Bohannon placed fifth in 1:13.56. Buckeye also got efforts from the sprint medley relay team of Cam Landes, Russo, Milo Cox and Paul Abbott, which took sixth in 1:48.02, and the mid medley relay team of Russo, Cielma, Joey Adams and Abbott, which finished seventh in 4:11.99.

Taken together, it was the kind of complete performance that defines a winning relay meet. The Bucks got a marquee school record, individual brilliance from Bonnett, victories on the track and in the ring, and enough balance everywhere else to finish first out of 12 teams. On a night built around teamwork, Buckeye looked every bit like the class of its home meet.