Trinity Hansma will battle her butterflies and toughest competition to date.
The Vernon AAA Track and Field Club member, a Grade 10 student at Armstrong’s Pleasant Valley Secondary School, is in Sainte-Thérèse/Blainville, Que. for today’s start of the Legion National Youth Track and Field Championships.
Hansma, 14, will compete for sure in high jump and possibly a relay event.
“I’m really excited, it should be fun,” said Hansma, who expected nerves to be part of her national experience. “I’m a bit nervous but that’s part of things. I get little flashes of nervousness, then it comes and goes away.”
Hansma earned her spot on Team B.C. for the Legion nationals by placing second and meeting a qualifying standard at a club jamboree meet in Nanaimo earlier this summer.
In the spring, Hansma set an Okanagan Valley junior girls high school record with a leap of 1.66-metres, a mark that would have bettered the senior girls record (1.65-m).
“High jump, for me, is easy and fun,” said Hansma. “It gives me an opportunity to meet new people, and it’s something that interests me and can be my own that I don’t have to share with many people, if that makes sense.”
She started high jump in elementary school, carried on at Len Wood Middle School, then moved up to PVSS as a Grade 8 student to train with Ian Cameron, who is the Vernon AAA club head coach and head coach for Team B.C. at the Legion nationals.
“It’s an extremely hard team to make; the standards are very high,” said Cameron. “I will be helping them do what they do.”
Joining Hansma in Quebec will be Glynis Sim of Salmon Arm, who will compete in the steeplechase.
Sim was sixth in the 2,000-metre steeplechase final, and shattered her personal best time by seven seconds with a time of 6:45:58, at the recent International Association of Athletics Federations World Youth Championships in Cali, Colombia.
Vernon’s Hannah Bennison, who was eighth in the girl’s 3,000-m race in Cali, also qualified for the Legion nationals but is unable to compete due to a foot injury.
“I’m very disappointed,” said Bennison. “It happened after the worlds. I’m resting it now and will be ready for the (school) cross-country season.”
A fourth Vernon AAA member is competing at a major competition.
Tyra Gilbert, 19, from Armstrong, should be among the favourites in the women’s 100-m hurdles at the Western Canada Summer Games in Fort McMurray, Alta.
“I’m pretty nervous but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” said Gilbert, who has spent the summer working at the Armstrong’s Memorial Park swimming pool.
Gilbert, who will attend Simon Fraser University in the fall, and be part of the school’s track team, qualified for the Western Canada Games at the club jamboree in Nanaimo, where she won the 100-m hurdles.
“I’ve been training four-to-five days a week since January,” said Gilbert, whose personal best time in the event is 15.36. “I’d like to run under 15 seconds. That would be cool.”
Gilbert, who competed at the Legion nationals in 2013, will also compete in the triple jump and long jump in Fort McMurray.
