Nina Schultz joined a celebrated list of remarkable Burnaby/New Westminster multi-events athletes.
The New Westminster Secondary School junior became the fifth district female athlete since 1980 to win the B.C. high school heptathlon title in Abbotsford last weekend.
Schultz defeated three of last year’s runners-up in her provincial multi-events debut, recording two wins and three other top-three finishes in the two-day, seven-event competition.
The Grade 10 athlete opened with a win in the 100-metre hurdles in a quick time of 14.92, which would have been a gold-medal time in the individual race last season. She also won the long jump to start Day 2 of the competition with a personal-best leap of 5.72m – another possible first-place jump and best individual effort in the field event since Sabrina Nettey’s winning six-metre-winning jump in 2008.
On the opening day, Schultz finished runner-up in the high jump at 1.59m, while placing third in both the shot put, at 9.51m, and the 200m, in a time of 26.55.
Schultz finished in mid-pack in the javelin and 800m on the final day of the multi-events but still managed to hold off last year’s runner-up Robyn Buckingham of Walnut Grove by nearly 150 points. She also defeated Hannah Beaton of Langley Fundamental and Monique Lisek of Maple Ridge – last year’s third- and fourth-place finishers, respectively.
Stephanie Cho of Winston Churchill placed third in this year’s multi-event final with 4,342 total points.
Schultz’s winning score of 4,655 points was far off four-time heptathlon champion Georgia Ellenwood’s B.C. record 5,296 numbers from last year.
But when put into perspective, Schultz’s aggregate total is among the best of any past multi-event’s winner.
Ellenwood won her first of four titles as a Grade 9 with a 4,661 total.
G.P. Vanier’s three-time winner from 2004 to ’06, Katie Gallagher, scored a personal-best 4,554 in the 2005 championships.
Burnaby Central’s Angela Anoliefoh and Natalie Jackson shared four titles between them from 1996 and 2000. Jackson’s best 4,712 came in her senior year, while Anoliefoh won as junior in 1998 when she won with a 4.553 total score.
Another Burnaby Central great, Charmaine Cotton, won back-to-back heptathlon titles 20 years ago with a best score of 4,179.
Perhaps the best of all BurWest high school heptathlete was Allison Eades, who won four consecutive titles from 1980 to ’83, breaking her own provincial high school record three times with B.C.-best 5,156 aggregate in her final year.
That record did not last long however. D.W. Poppy’s Kelly Ann Kempf set a new standard of 5,262 in 1985, which stood up for nearly three decades until Ellenwood’s record-setting performance last year.
