Dustin Brock Moore Jr.
Coming into this season, I thought I had a pretty good handle on how this event would play out this season. I felt like the state record was on notice and the only ones that were going to give it a scare were Shamari Covington or Kylan Bernard. The season hadn't officially started for me to be proven wrong. When I was processing results for the Dobyns-Bennett Jaboree-Style meet on March 10th, the only highlight that the database flagged for me was as follows.
Sometimes when I time this early in the season that seems too good to be true is but two weeks later I got to see Dustin Brock Moore Jr. run in person and any skepticism from that first meet dissipated. He's the real deal. After interviewing him it was obvious that first race was him taking out two years of frustration (Covid in 2020 and an ACL injury in 2021) onto the ten hurdles that stood between him and the finish line. The Greenville senior is still making up for lost time though and on Saturday continued his revenge tour at the Volunteer Track Classic.
As I stated, I did not see this coming but Greeneville Head Coach Larry Blalock did. We talked about the season Greeneville is having.
Greeneville first and only Boy's State Track and Field Title came in 2014 and it only took 56 points to win it. Given the schedule he put on his boys on Saturday he's clearly ramping his athletes up for a multiple runs in a day schedule. Moore Jr. ran four races: hurdle prelims, hurdle finals, 300m hurdles, and the 4x100m relay. Jaden Stevenson, the other critical point scorer for the Greene Devils, ran five races. Prelims and Finals for both short sprints and the 4x100m relay. In a state meet setting he'll likely throw on the Long jump as well. Here's his 200m dash final which he ran a 21.43 en route to victory on his 5th race in about 5 hours.
Based on the sheer firepower in sprints they're going to be hard to beat but we'll start running some virtual meets in the next couple of weeks to see how thing stack up prior to the state meet.