Last week, Admiral Farragut’s boys track team hoisted the trophy and posed for pictures after winning the Class A, District 10 meet.
Now, the Blue Jackets have to swap that trophy for the runnerup one.
A discrepancy in the point totals was discovered after the meet, hosted by Sarasota Out-of-Door. Turns out, Northside Christian won the boys title — by a point.
The difference came in the 110 hurdles, where meet officials could not decide who finished fourth or fifth. So they the made the two hurdlers in question run again.
In the runoff, Northside Christian’s Mark Kinzler beat AFA’s Samuel Hermanns.
“It was so bizarre,” Mustangs coach Jeff Goodwin said. “To have a team total come down to something like that. You can’t even make this stuff up.”
Throughout the meet, there were major technical difficulties. The electronic timing and camera equipment malfunctioned, meaning all running events had to be hand timed.
In the preliminaries of the girls 300 hurdles, an entire row was missing in two heats. Some of the hurdles were uneven as well, with a few set at the boys’ standard of 33 inches instead of the standard 30 for girls.
The nine-team meet, which started at 9 a.m., took 10 hours to complete.
“In 27 years of coaching, it was the most disorganized meet I’ve ever seen,” AFA volunteer coach Phil Barnhill said.