The girls compete in the 100 meter high hurdles during the first track meet held at Harrison Central’s new track facility adjacent to the high school in Cadiz. Competing in the junior high meet were teams from Harrison Central, St. Clairsville and Edison.

CADIZ — To borrow a line from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, ‘if you build it, they will come.’

That line — though about baseball in the movie — applied perfectly to Harrison Central Wednesday evening.

For the first time in Harrison Central history, the Huskies played host to a track meet on their basically brand new, eight-lane, all-weather surface adjacent to the high school.

Harrison Central, St. Clairsville and Edison’s junior high teams had the luxury of formally christening the facility and the Harrison varsity athletes will get their chance to perform at home for the first time Tuesday.

“The kids and coaches are thrilled to death to be able to host this meet,” Harrison Central Director of Athletics Ray Hibbs said.

The facility was ready to go for the 2020 season, but it was eventually canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“That was extremely tough,” Hibbs said. “It was especially tough on those seniors, who had been excited to have a track meet for the first time. It was tough to watch the kids to have to go through that.”

All told, Harrison Central will play host to a pair of high school and junior high meets. All of those will be relatively small as the Huskies become acclimated to hosting track meets, which is more complex than many realize.

“There is a lot of work that goes into running a track meet, especially if you want to run one that moves smoothly,” Hibbs said. “We don’t want a lot of hiccups, hesitation or having people just waiting around. You run a bad meet and people don’t come back., so we’re going to keep things small this year and see how it goes. We may start out with a junior high invitational and just build as we go along.”

Hosting track meets takes manpower. And lots of it, actually. Harrison Central utilized three OHSAA registered officials and then relied upon volunteers at the finish line, overseeing field events, moving hurdles and blocks, etc.

“The newness (of the facility) has definitely helped out,” Hibbs said. “We have good (participation) numbers in both the junior high and high school programs. We’ve had numerous parents step up in many ways to help out. I have to give credit to the coaching staff and my assistant athletic director.”

Harrison Central boys track coach Luke Turner called hosting their first meet, “pretty cool.”

“To see it all come together is great,” Turner said. “You always pay attention (at meets) to how many people it takes to work a meet, but not that much since it’s not your baby. It makes you really appreciate what the other schools have been doing to host meets.”

On top of needing manpower, hosting track meets — or simply having a facility — can lead to a major expenditure for the athletic department. Harrison Central has a fully automatic timing system, which won’t be used this season, a pole vault pit, two high jump pits, a pair of long jump pits and entirely new hurdles with enough extras so they don’t need to be moved around for the 300 hurdles.

“Basically, I got quotes from three different companies and went with one company for this group of stuff and another company for another group,” Hibbs said. “We took care of everything we needed to (equipment wise).”

Pole vault is an entirely new event for the Huskies. Normally, they’ve entered a high school meet with only 17 events because they’ve never had a pole vault. Now, all of their coaches are certified in pole vault and they have a handful of athletes working on the event.

While hosting the meets is a nice luxury, having the facility available for practice has been just as important. Harrison Central was able to hold a couple weeks worth of practices before the 2020 shutdown went into effect. Both the boys and girls teams have used it diligently leading up to this season.

“Other than maybe a little bit of asphalt, (a facility) is something we’ve never had before,” Huskies head boys coach Luke Turner said. “It’s just unreal to have this.”

The Huskies varsity squads have competed just once and that was last weekend at the Steubenville Early Bird. Turner saw, already, the benefits of having their own track.

“We’re more familiar with every events, whereas, in other years there have been events we’ve not even practiced until we get to the meet because we didn’t have the facility,” Turner said. “The meets at the beginning of the season were always practices before, but now we can treat it as a competition.”

“Having this has been amazing for our teams because they were able to get outside basically from the get-go,” Hibbs said. “We’ve been able to practice field events probably way more than they have in their lives because we have somewhere to do it. Things we’ve never been able to do anymore, we’re able to do.”

The Huskies opened their new high school in August of 2019 and, according to Hibbs, the original thought was that the track facility would be completed before the school.

“There were a lot of delays with what was going on up here, but this (track) got done just about the same time we moved into the new (school),” Hibbs said.

Hibbs was pleased with how things have ran logistically. Getting to the starting line, however, wasn’t as smooth. Because Harrison Central elected to build a new softball stadium, literally right beside the track complex, it caused a late adjustment of where the shot put and discus circles were placed.

“We made the adjustment and now everything is set up pretty well,” Hibbs said.

Hibbs and the Huskies track staff plan to meet in the coming days to “debrief” on what transpired during the junior high meet and adjust as necessary to be ready for the varsity meet.

“We’ll figure out where we need to improve at for next week,” Hibbs said.