TOLEDO — It would be generous to call the wet, muddy rock pit around Ted Hippi Field at Toledo High School a track. The old school track has seen better days, and plenty of them. Now it’s filled with holes and puddles and covered in moss, making it difficult for Toledo track athletes to properly practice for meets.
Toledo head coach Don Schaplow is working to change that, and soon. He and other people near and dear to the cause are going in front of the Toledo school board on Thursday to reignite the push for an all-weather track.
“It’s just obviously a very important piece, not only for our athletic apartment, but for our community,” Schaplow said. “The purpose of going to the board meeting is for the district and ourselves to kind of get this back to the top of the menu again for some community awareness.”
When Schaplow first moved to Toledo at the turn of the century, he was surprised the school still had a dirt track. Now more than two decades later, that same track is still in use.
As a member of the Toledo Track & Training Club (TNT) — a non-profit with the hopes of replacing the track — Schaplow has surveyed over 200 schools in western Washington. Of those schools only nine of them were still using a dirt track.
Because of the dirt track, the Riverhawks can’t host any varsity meets at home. They have to adjust their practices to fit the facilities they have, or straight up head to another school to get proper practice in.
“Fortunately, we’ve got some really supportive coaches in our league…because we actually have to go practice at their facilities sometimes,” Schaplow said.
And it’s not as though the Riverhawks’ track program is flagging in numbers. Toledo has 65 students in grades seven through 12 participating in track this season from a school of around 250 students.
“That’s actually the highest percentage of kids out for a sport (in) seventh through 12th (grade) out of any sport in the district,” Schaplow said. “The facility is highly used.”
The Riverhawks have also put together a successful program, regularly competing against schools several classifications larger. In the past 10 years, 75 Toledo athletes have participated at State, bringing home 56 medals. Those numbers are even better over the last five years, with 37 of 49 participants medaling, including three State champs.
“We’ve managed to be very successful in spite of the facility,” Schaplow said.
The Riverhawks also don’t have the means to practice pole vault, so they don’t have any competitors in that event, sacrificing points right off the top in every meet they attend as a result.
Wyatt Neff is one of those athletes that has found success despite the dire state of the current facilities. Neff has posted the second best javelin toss in the state at the 2B level this year, and competes in a myriad of other events like long jump, discus, sprints and relays.
Neff described how he’s adjusted in practice, weaving his way around puddles during warmups, wearing cleats to practice, throwing the javelin on the side, and marking out lines in the dirt for handoff practice for relays. Neff credited his coaches for keeping their spirits high down in the muck.
“He’s really good at making us embrace the rainy weather days,” Neff said. “When we go to track meets and everyone else is like ‘man, this is terrible, I want to go home,’ we have a dirt track and so we’re used to some things that are a little less and we have great dispositions.”
Schaplow said that positivity is a necessity, but it only goes so far.
“We try and not focus on the negative,” he said. “We try and embrace everything and just be thankful for what we have. But at the same time, all-weather tracks have been a thing in Washington since the ‘80s.”
The Riverhawks made their way to Winlock to practice on their neighbor’s synthetic surface over spring break, something Neff described as a borderline cathartic experience.
“It was so nice and beneficial to our events to be throwing off a surface, running on a surface,” he said.
The process to get a new track at Toledo made some major headway in March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic quickly shifted focuses and bumped the project off the agenda. Now Schaplow wants to get back on track since activities canceled during the pandemic are back in full swing, if still subject to the whims of weather.
When the project was first brought to the table, the estimated cost was $450,000, but now that cost has nearly doubled. Schaplow said if action isn’t taken soon, the price will only continue to increase. He added that TNT is working on corporate grants to provide a portion of the funding for the new track to help move the process along.
Schaplow mentioned that a new track would allow Toledo to host meets, bringing revenue to local businesses, while also providing a place for community members at large to gather for exercise.
Toledo’s managed to build and maintain a strong program with subpar facilities compared to others around the state, but they’re hoping a new track can give that program another leg up on the competition.
For those interested, donations to the project can be made on the TNT website at toledotrack.org or by emailing Schaplow at dons@toledoschools.us.
