Boyster dominates sprints at state track meet

Have yourself a day, Blake Boyster.
Have yourself three days while you’re at it.
Boyster, a junior sprinter for Custer High School, had a meet for the ages at the South Dakota Class A State Track Meet last weekend when he won the 100, 200 and 400 to propel the Wildcat boys to a third-place finish at the meet. The Wildcat boys closed the meet with 59 points, 30 of which came from Boyster’s three gold meals. Sioux Falls Christian won the meet with a team total of 125.
“It feels pretty good. It’s definitely one of the best feelings,” Boyster said of his three championships. “I’m still kind of recovering. It was great.”
Boyster won the 400 last year as a sophomore, and said that was the race he was both most confident in and the one he wanted to win the most since he was the defending champion.
“I had a really good start. I almost immediately passed the guy in lane five, who was the number two seed,” he said. “Coming down the back stretch I started to gain some separation and by the 200 to 250 (meter) mark I was ahead of everyone.”
Boyster finished the race with a time of 49.44.
In the 100, Boyster posted a time of 11.04, edging out Belle Fourche speedster Aidan Giffen, who entered the meet as the top seed in the race.
“My start wasn’t the best—but it wasn’t the worst,” Boyster said of the race. “I came out middle of the pack. After that I had a good acceleration phase and hit my top speed and started to pull away.”
Boyster said by the time he got to the 200 finals his legs were “kind of fried” from all the previous racing he had done. By the last 100 of the race, however, he started to pull away and found another gold medal in a time of 22.51.
“Blake was a very focused young man the last year preparing for big meet competition,” head coach Karen Karim said. “He had a goal of winning all three events and worked very hard to get there. Even though he had some ups and downs during the season I never doubted he had the capability of winning all three of those races. He is a competitor.”
The Wildcats’ other gold medal came from thrower Kellyn Kortemeyer, who won the girls discus competition in spectacular fashion with a throw of 165-11. The throw not only bested Kortemeyer’s school record but broke a 43-year-old state record as well.
Both the shot put and discus competition came down to a duel between Kortemeyer and Hamlin’s Gracelyn Leiseth, who was popping huge throws and breaking records all season. On Kortemeyer’s first throw she fouled, and Leiseth stepped into the ring and launched a 160-foot throw—something Kortemeyer had never done.
Well, until a few minutes later, that is.
“I guess I was just thinking, ‘well, she had her fun, now I will have mine,’” Kortemeyer said of watching Leiseth’s throw. “We’re not going down without a fight. We’re not going down without competition. Once she threw I thought ‘I’m capable of throwing that much, I just have to do it.’”
Kortemeyer won the shot put state title as both an eighth grader and freshman, but had not won a title in either throw since then and had never won a discus title. In fact, the discus had not gone well for her at any state meet, and when she thinks about the fact she improved her best throw by 30 feet during the course of the season she is a little taken aback.
“My whole goal this year was to get our school record, not to get the state record,” she said. “At the beginning of the year I didn’t even know what the state record was.”
“She leveled up to the competition,” Karim said of Kortemeyer’s championship throw. “I was very proud of her.”
Kortemeyer has now held both the state record in both the shot put and discus, although Leiseth now holds the state shot put record by virtue of her gold medal-winning throw of 52-6 3/4 in that event. Kortemeyer took second in that event with a best throw of 45-2.
Kortemeyer said she has matured a great deal since last year’s state meet, when she spent the aftermath of a disappointing meet crying before her mother told her to snap out of it and get her head up.
“In the moment I was mad at her, but she was right,” she said. “I’ve grown as a person, grown in my mentality. It’s not who is the better athlete or thrower, it’s who is better on that day. (Leiseth) popped one in shot put, I popped one in discus. Whatever happens happens. We both want it as much as the other and are going after the same thing.”
The girls closed out the meet with 83 points, bested by Sioux Falls Christian’s total of 101.5.
“We stood an outside chance of competing with them,” Karim said. “We would have had to have everything go right and we would have to extend the kids more than we did.”
Karim said the heat, recovery time and keeping the athletes in their comfort zone all went into factoring which events to place athletes in, as many of them had qualified for many more than the four events they are allowed to compete in at the meet.
“We tried to put them where they could do the best,” she said.
Besides Kortemeyer’s silver medal in the shot put, the Wildcats also got an individual silver medal from Ramsey Karim, who almost caught defending state champion Jade Ecoffey of Red Cloud in placing second in the 3200 at a time of 11:09.41, which improved on a school record time she already owned.
It appears it is only a matter of time before Ciana Stiefel is a state champion, as the freshman pole vaulter broke the school record in the pole vault by clearing 11-0, placing her second. Eleven feet was the state championship-winning height, but Stiefel received second place by virtue of having one more miss than the eventual champion. Stiefel’s school record beat the old mark of 10-6 1/4 set by Shawna Anthony in 2001.
Two Wildcat relay teams placed second for the girls, as the 3200 team of Kadense Dooley, Brit Wheeler, Josey Wahlstrom and Ramsey Karim finished in 9:23.28, which broke the school record of 9:26.26 set in 2016 by Mallory Delmont, Morgan Parys, Clara Sedlacek and Tori Glazier. Karim said each girl ran a personal-best time in running their leg of the race.
Karim and Wahlstrom were also a part of the second-place finishing 1600 team, joined by Rachel Miklos and Jojo Larsen to run a time of 4:06.59.
The Wildcats picked up a third-place finish from Larsen in the 300, where she ran a time of 26.45, and also from Wahlstrom in the 400 at 59.95. Karim was third in the 1600 at 5:13.91.
Larsen was fourth in the 100 at 12.81, as was Alice Sedlacek in the discus at 119-6. The final two places for the girls came from Dooley (sixth) in the 1600 at 5:16.82 and Larsen (seventh) in the 400 at 1:01.22.
“This is one of the best girls team to come through Custer. They had the ability to score in so many events,” Coach Karim said.
For the boys, Mikael Grace competed through a stress fracture to clear 6-2 in the high jump, which was good for third place. Justin Doyle placed fourth in the shot put with a best throw of 48-6 1/2, while the 3200 relay team of Gage Grohs, Sam Gaulke, Drew Lehman and Miles Ellman was fourth at 8:22.70. Ellman earned an individual fourth-place finish in the 1600 at 4:30.48.
Grohs had an individual medal as well, placing fifth in the 3200 at 9:56.42, and Ellman was sixth in the 800 at 2:00.05. Rounding out the Wildcat placings with Robbie Emery, who was eighth in the pole vault at 12-6.
“I was really proud of our kids, the effort they made. It was a great meet across the board,” Karim said. “There was a few disappointments. But that’s the nature of sports. Nothing goes perfectly.”
The Wildcats graduate a deep and talented group of seniors, but will return a large amount of talent next year in the hopes of continuing Custer’s excellent tradition in track and field.
“We’ll try to get our kids we have to the next level, and hope we can find some more somewhere else,” Karim said. “When your kids go out and compete to the best of their ability, that’s all you can ask for as a coach. It was a great group of kids to work with.”