By REID TUCKER
It’s fair to say South Walton High School’s Christian Friis closed out the summer before his junior year in grand fashion.
Friis, who had already earned All-American status for a sixth-place finish at the New Balance Nationals Outdoor meet in June and an overall win at the Amateur Athletic Union club nationals, claimed first place in the decathlon at the 2014 AAU Junior Olympic Games. This year’s meet, which took place in Des Moines, Iowa, at Drake University over the weekend of July 26-27, saw Friis battle back from a slow start on the first day of the dec to set a personal best score of 6,276 points. What’s more, Friis set personal records in the shot put and high jump, posting marks of 42 feet, 8 inches and 5-10.75, respectively.
Though not PRs, Friis’ mark of 150-01 in the javelin and a time of 15.09 seconds in the 110-meter hurdles enabled him to nab first place in both events. When added to second-place finishes in the discus with a throw of 123-11 and the aforementioned shot-put, Friis’ eventual overall win was virtually assured, if not unassailable, as he finished 10th in the 100-meter run (11.80) and in the long jump (18-11.75). Those were only the low water-marks of an otherwise exemplary effort at his second Junior Olympics appearance, which also featured a fifth-place showing in the 400 (52.80), a five-way tie for fifth in the pole vault (10-11.75) and a fourth-place finish in the 1,500 (4:47.69) to wrap up the decathlon.
Friis was alone among coach Willie Parker’s recent crop of track products either. Gabe Moore represented Team USA and finished eighth in the world at the World Junior Championships (effectively becoming one of the two best 18-year-old multidiscipline track athletes on the planet), but fellow Bulldog Sam Morgan wasn’t going to let his team mates take all the glory.
Morgan, a rising junior at Freeport High School, continued his crew’s winning ways by laying claim to his own All-American status at the U.S.A. Track and Field Junior Olympics over the weekend of July 21-22. He finished eighth on his biggest stage yet, with top-10 finishes in seven of 10 events: he came in 12th in the 110 hurdles, crossing the line in 16.54, tied for 14th in the high jump, posting mark of 5-05 after some difficulty, and 15th with a throw of 102-02 in the javelin. Morgan came in eighth in the shot put (38-02), discus (103-04) and pole vault (10-04), but he got seventh in the long jump (19-08.75) and sixth in both the 400 (52.35) and the 1,500 (4:40.18) for a final score of 4,968.
