Well, that’s ‘Aud:’ Rochester’s Wagner advances to state in 300 hurdles

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Audrey Wagner

WARSAW — Less than two years ago, Rochester senior Audrey Wagner’s teammate Harrison Dunwoody suggested she try the 300 hurdles.

The rest was Zebra track and field history.

Less than two years after trying the 300 meter hurdles for the first time, she is now the first Rochester athlete that will come to mind when it comes to the event.

Already a two-time Three Rivers Conference champion and already a sectional champion and already the fastest in the event in school history many times over, she qualified for the IHSAA state finals in the event at the Warsaw regional Tuesday by finishing second.

Wagner’s time of 45.33 seconds crushed her sectional time from last week at Bremen by more than a second, and she even ran down Warsaw’s Annabel Parker in the final stretch to take second.

South Bend Washington’s Adrianna Swanson won the race in 44.67 seconds, and Parker also earned a state spot by finishing third in 45.36.

Tippecanoe Valley’s Betty Shepherd set a personal best in 45.97 – it was her first time under 46 – but had to settle for fourth and will have to hope for a state callback. Shepherd finished 18th at state in 2024.

Wagner was seeded third behind Swanson and Parker coming into the race.

“I am so excited,” Wagner said.

Wagner was the only area athlete to advance.

“I’m just happy for her because she put in a great deal of work throughout this season and the seasons prior,” Rochester coach Ryan Helt said. “There’s a lot of pressure that’s on you. You know you’re this close. She handled herself with composure, and I’m just very pleased that all that hard work paid off. She’s going to get a chance to run on a pretty big stage.”

Rochester sophomore Kyra Doran was 13th in the long jump at 15-5 and did not advance to the finals. The 15-5 was Doran’s only fair jump; the other two were fouls.

Also, Rochester junior Allyson Calloway placed 14th in the 3,200 in 12:25.45. The time was her second best ever but 20 seconds slower than her time at the Bremen sectional May 20.

The only other Valley entry in the regional was the 4 x 100 relay team. The relay, which consisted of Gaby Gonzalez, Izabella Woodruff, Shepherd and Hadley Wise took 14th place in 51.10 seconds.

Wagner said she did not know about Swanson before the race, but she seemed to set a pace for her competitors to follow.

“She definitely made herself known really quick,” Wagner said. “And I was obviously scared of her, and I really wanted to battle for second, and because of my lane placement, they were behind me, and so when I felt them coming up closer to me, that pushed me to go faster.”

Wagner was asked whether the race was nerve-wracking or fun.

“Both,” Wagner said. “Definitely more nerve-wracking than anything else. I’ve never been really this nervous about a race before, but I was definitely shaking at the start. … I really didn’t know if I would secure the third spot because I knew that a lot of the girls wanted it, and I was really nervous.”

Wagner said she realized she could make state after the sectional. She won that race in 46.53 seconds last week in drizzly, dreary conditions at Bremen.

In a way, she cleared a mental hurdle with her sectional performance.

“After sectional, I realized that I can push myself in races more than I thought I could,” Wagner said. “A coach can tell you, but you don’t really realize it unless you do it yourself because I was too headstrong for the coaches, so I always thought that I wouldn’t be able to.”

She was asked to describe the 300 hurdles to somebody who had never run it before.

“It’s just a combination of the 400 if they slapped a bunch of hurdles in the middle,” Wagner said. “It’s painful but really rewarding. … A lot of people think that it’s worse than the 400. Personally, I think the 300 is easier, but yeah, there are definitely some people that think I’m crazy for running it.”

Wagner has run track for four years. Wagner was once a 400 runner, but Dunwoody suggested she give the 300 hurdles a try right after the end of her sophomore season in May 2023.

So she tried it, and her first try impressed Helt.

“We took her out and just tried her on the hurdles,” Helt said. “No spikes, no blocks. And I think she ran a 52, which would have been better than our best runner that year, and (we) looked at past runners and compared different times, and I said I think you can be really outstanding here. She did all the work from there.”

Helt praised the entire coaching staff. Assistant coach Alysha Wachtmann, a former state qualifier herself in the hurdles at Wawasee and a former collegiate hurdler at Taylor University, was heavily involved in her coaching.

“Coach Wachtmann has worked with her a lot,” Helt said. “We’ve got a good crew of other hurdlers, and they work together and challenge each other in practice. But she's the leader of that group, you know.”

On one hand, making state is the culmination of every athlete’s dream, and Wagner has gone about it extraordinarily fast given how recently she tried the event. On the other hand, Wagner said it takes patience to see progress in an event in which every tenth of a second matters.

“The first time I ever did the 300 hurdles, I think I was a 53 or 51,” Wagner said. “I can’t quite remember. … It took me many, many races to break 46, which was today. … I was just going down in milliseconds. It definitely takes a lot of perseverance.”

Doran and Calloway

Helt described Doran’s night as “disappointing.”

“She had trouble getting comfortable with her mark,” Helt said. “She came in and scratched on her first attempt, and we had to adjust her mark, and she scratched just by a few inches again. She got kind of a safety jump at the end, which isn’t really what you want to do. I just think she didn’t feel comfortable with where she was starting, and that affected her.”

As for Calloway, Helt noted that it is tough to set a PR two straight weeks in a distance event like the 3,200.

“We knew it was going to take everything she had just to get into this field,” Helt said. “I’m sure she would have liked to have beaten her mark from last week, but realistically, that’s a big ask for a kid.”