Timber Creek Wins Four Events at Moorestown Invitational Meet

The Timber Creek boys' track team was itching to get started.

When you’re the three-time defending Olympic Conference, South Jersey Group 3 and state Group 3 champions, it’s understandable.

“A lot of teams ran last week at Buena or the Hall of Fame,” Timber Creek coach Chris Grottini said. “The kids see the results in the paper and they come into school and say, ‘See what this one did or that one did’, and I just told them to relax.”

If first impressions are lasting impressions, Timber Creek made one heck of a first impression.

The Chargers set a meet record in winning the shuttle hurdles and also finished first in the javelin relay, long jump relay and triple jump relay at the Moorestown Invitational Track Meet on Saturday.

And they did this despite missing Damiere Byrd, who was visiting the University of South Carolina, where he will go college and play fun football and run track, and Brian Grant.

The shuttles relay team of Donnie Houser, Kevin Potter, Josh Gray and Brandon Grayson finished first with a time of 1:03.14 to win the large school division. The record in the event was 1:04.00 set by Cherokee in 2009.               

“I was real happy with that,” Grottini said. “It was the first time they’ve focused on racing together. I had two experienced hurdlers in Donnie and Kevin. Josh did it a couple of times last year and Brandon is new to hurdles.”

“I just concentrated on getting off to a good start,” Houser said. “I hit one hurdle, but overall it was a good race. Our goal is for everybody to go under 16. I was 15.1 and I think Kevin was 15.7. The other two guys were just over 16, so it’s a good start.”

Potter, the defending state long jump champion, had the best jump of the competition in the long jump relay with a distance of 20 feet, 9 inches. But he wasn’t satisfied.

“I jumped 22-4 on Thursday,” he said. “My legs just felt tight today.”

Grayson leaped 43 feet, 8 inches to record the best jump of the day in the triple jump.

Quanzell Lambert threw a personal record 158 feet in winning the javelin relay with Calvin Lowe.

“I felt good,” Lambert said. “It’s my (personal record) by two feet so I’m pretty happy.”

Lowe, the quarterback for the Chargers football team who just started throwing the javelin this year, said it felt good.

“I had a good release, but there is still a lot of room for improvement,” he admitted. “A day like this makes me want to get back to work on Monday.”