Freeport thrives in county championships

Succeeding in the Nassau Class A championships was, simply put, a good feeling for Freeport boys track & field coach Charles Gilreath.

“The team competed well,” Gilreath said. “We were right there where I thought we should be. We knew going in there was going to be a tough match between Massapequa and Farmingdale and Syosset, so we scored what I thought we could score.”

Unfortunately, this was the first country championship meet that he could not coach in person due to personal reasons, but that didn’t stop him from leading from afar.

“It was different watching my team going live,” he said. “Before they ran that day we had a Google meet on our infield and we did our normal routine of our pep talk; looked like they gave a great effort and I was pleased with a lot of the things we did right going into the rest of the season.”

Gilreath takes pride in the fact that his upperclassmen are such a dominant force on the track, both individually and collectively.

“I have a good group of seniors, but the core of the team are juniors,” Gilreath said. “Those guys, they work tireless[ly]. You see the camaraderie that they built amongst each other. That group of kids, they always supporting each other, and I knew that we had a good nucleus moving forward, thinking we were going to have a pretty good year.”

In that senior class includes figures like Christopher Ramos-Abreu, who Gilreath said stepped up this year. In addition, exists “middle-distance runners” Reginald Frazier and Richard Cleveland, coach describing them as “quality seniors” who have been on the team for years.

In Freeport’s senior class, one of the athletes who shines brightest is Jordon Quinn, a two-time New York state champion, who won the county championship 55-meter hurdles dash Feb. 5 in 7.48 seconds. On first reference, coach called him “the best hurler in the state.”

“He won the 55 hurdles last year and the 110 outdoors. He works at his craft like nobody else I’ve ever seen, [and] this is year 39 that I’ve been coaching,” Gilreath said. “He supports his teammates, does his hurdle work every day and he wants to be the best.”

Freeport also won a country championship in the 4x400 relay, courtesy of the efforts of Lucca Noboa, Dorian Boyd, Hunter Scott and Giovany Villatoro, and Gilreath approached this event as methodically as a chess match.”

“They were excited,” Gilreath said. “it gave Giovany a good chance to be the anchor; we knew if we got a good lead, Giovany’s a middle distance guy and he was able to finish the job, so [the team] was excited about holding up the tradition because 4x400 is an event that we like to win every year and it’s a highly competitive event. So, they take a lot of pride in being on the 4x400.”

Freeport also placed third in the 4x200 relay, and had Noboa, Chase Holt and Dorian Boyd place 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the 600-meter run.