by Les Knutson
Sports Reporter
Freshman Morgan Gehl, senior Cheyenne Schaffer and eighth-grader Skylar Fisher finished the 2018 high school track and field season as the three leading girls’ scorers for the first-year pairing arrangement of Heron Lake-Okabena and Fulda.
Gehl, a Fulda freshman, racked up a team-leading total of 286.5 points, including scoring 12 at the state meet and 20 in the section meet. She won a total of 17 races this spring (nine in the 1,600, eight in the 3,200 and one in the 800), including six remarkable double-doubles.
Morgan won both the 1,600 and 3,200 at the Arrow Relays (Pipestone, May 1), the Sentinel Relays (Fairmont, May 4), the Section 3A True Team Meet (Slayton, May 7), the Trojan Relays (Worthington, May 15), the East Sub-Section Meet (Redwood Falls, May 24) and the Section 3A Meet (Montevideo, May 31).
At the Class A State Meet at Hamline University in St. Paul (June 8-9), Gehl capped her brilliant season with a pair of impressive fourth-places, setting new school records in each race. She ran a time of 10:59.91 and finished fourth in the 3,200 on Friday evening, shaving 13.3 seconds off her former all-time best. Morgan came back on Saturday and blazed a FHS school record time of 5:04.23 in the 1,600 as she bettered her previous-best mile time (5:14.36) by more than 10 seconds and claimed a second fourth-place state medal.
