Focusing on personal bests was the name of the game for Somers Middle School’s track team, and along the way they broke several school records.

Nearly half of the school went out for track this season, 55 total, and 12 of them broke previous school records. The school’s records only go back a few years and don’t account for all of their past athletes, but that’s not really the team’s focus according to coach Luke Johnson.

“We only use records to motivate a small number of athletes,” Johnson said. “We do pretty well at meets, usually second or third, when bringing about 45 kids when competing against teams of 100 to 150,”

Their season was only six weeks long and started the week after spring break. During that time the team had five meets, one in Ronan, Polson, Whitefish, Columbia Falls, and Kalispell. Every SMS athlete earned at least one personal best in the last track meet of the season in Kalispell two weeks ago.

Although the previous SMS records only go as far back as 2007, the new records show some pretty substantial athletes and all of them have plans to compete in high school according to Johnson.

Eli Brown, Jacob Calles, Jake Perrin and Dalton Manning set a new record in the 4x100 relay with a time of 50.75 seconds, the previous record was 51.0.

Brown, Perrin, Manning and Josh McCracken also set a new record in the 4x100 relay with an even faster time of 50.01.

Manning set a new record in the 100-meter dash with 12.09 and in the 100-meter hurdles with 15.55. The previous record in the 100-meter dash was 12.24 and the previous record in the 100-meter hurdles was 15.6.

Manning also set a new record in the high jump with 5-3 and in the 200-meter hurdles with 28.01. The previous record for the high jump was 5-0 and previous record in the 200-meter hurdles was 28.1.

Perrin set a new record in the 400-meter dash with 55.91, the previous record was 58.95.

Calles set a new record in the 800-meter run with 2:18 and in the 1,600-meter run with 5:06. The previous record in the 800-meter run was 2:25 and the previous record in the 1,600-meter run was 5:12.

However impressive the massive amount of new school records may be, Johnson emphasized that their goals were improvement and setting new personal best times.

“The last meet was one of the coolest meets I’ve been at,” Johnson said. “The reason it was so extraordinary is because almost every athlete got a PR (personal record) in at least one event…just seeing that improvement and some of the distance runners knocking off times, one got 5:06 in the mile and getting it down to that is huge.”

Manning started the season by running the 200-meter hurdles in 33 seconds and was able shave that down to 28 seconds during their six-week season.

Calles was running the mile with a time of 5:36 when the season started but got it down to 5:06. Perrin brought down his time in the 400-meter dash by four seconds, from 59 seconds to 55.

Johnson also said next year’s track team looks promising, so next season should be a good one as well.