At its first track meet of the regular season at Capuchino High School on Wednesday, March 19, track and field hit the ground running. In the 45 events Burlingame athletes competed in at the meet, at least one finished in the top three in 38 of them, with the Panthers taking home 22 victories.

Head coach Chris Coleman was proud to see the runners’ hard work pay off and believes the results are a good sign for future meets.

“We’ve seen some great performances. We’re also seeing some people surprise themselves as to what they’re capable of right now,” Coleman said.

The team has been practicing and conditioning for weeks in order to perform their best. While the competition at meets can make new runners nervous, for junior Ryan Liu, who ran the men’s varsity 1600 meters, the electric environment helped motivate him.

“It’s not just our team, but also the other teams up there, everyone’s cheering on collectively. I think it really helps me,” Liu said, “I could not have done this on a regular workout or practice. I need all the people and the fans and all the kids running around,”

Although track and field is often deemed an individual sport, sophomore Tad Folgner said competing with teammates gets him excited to run.

“I felt my performance was really good today. [It was] really nice to have Aiden Dille right behind me just keeping me on pace for the first couple laps,” Folgner said, “It’s just hard to run by yourself sometimes.”

Since it was the first meet of the season, Liu hopes to use the experience at Wednesday’s meet to grow his confidence and improve going forward.

“It gave me a good idea of where my fitness was, since I haven’t done a full-time trial since winter break. So I know where I have to train and my threshold like I need to be here and hit all of these splits and workouts. It gives me a good base,” Liu said.

During upcoming practices, Coleman plans on building on the strengths and weaknesses of each of his athletes to maximize their competitiveness and endurance.

“It gives us something to work on. If we see people have bad starts, we can work on starts. If we see people that need more endurance on the back end, we can work on that form and the jumps and different things like that,” Coleman said.

With the next meet not until April 8 against South San Francisco High School at Half Moon Bay, Coleman has time to plan the next few weeks to hone their skills and recover stronger and faster before the playoffs.

“So [the goal] is really just to use that time to prepare, to build the endurance, build the technique. So the next time that we go, we level up a little bit, and then we level up after that, and so on, so that we peak at the end of the season,” Coleman said.