The Mt. Blue girls track team is anxious. It wants to see what Edward Little has.

The Edward Little girls track team is anxious. It wants to see what Mt. Blue has.

On Saturday the two traditional track powers will get their chance when, for the first time, they face each other in the KVAC meet at Morse High School in Bath.

“We haven’t seen anyone, really,” EL coach Steve Robertson said. “We know that Mt. Blue is strong but with the schedule, we haven’t seen them at all this year, and it would be good to see them before the state meet.”

“The biggest thing for us is going to be having a meet in which the girls are pushed,” Mt. Blue coach Kelley Cullenberg said. “We’ve tried to downplay that it’s a big meet and just have the kids focus on finally facing some other kids that are going to push them hard. This will help them to get better going into the state meet next week.”

Neither team has lost a regular season meet this year, and with the recent re-alignment, this will be the first time the two meet prior to the state meet.

“I really think it will be us and Mt. Blue,” Robertson said. “We don’t have as much depth as in past years, and we haven’t had the level of competition in the meets that we would have liked, but we seem to be coming around at the right time.”

For EL, the key to the meet may lie in the relays.

“I think the 4×400 is going to be the key in the meet,” coach Rebecca Hefty said. “Right now we have one girls from every class in that race, and we still really haven’t settled on who will run it, but we’re getting there. That is going to be a very important race.”

Hefty also sees Waterville as a potential adversary at the top.

“They are a sneaky team,” Hefty said. “You never know, when a team has a good coach, what you might see in the bigger meets. They tend to not let on what they have for strengths, so even though we have seen them twice and won, you just never know.”

In the boys’ race, this may be one of the more wide open KVAC meets in recent memory.

“It seems that every team going in has one or two strengths,” Oxford Hills coach Craig Jipson said. “I know that Gardiner has a hurdler, and that Cony has a distance runner, and that Morse has a sprinter and of course Mt. Blue has some distance runners, so it will be interesting to see what happens.”

The Vikings have a potential three-event champion in Jared Maher, who will jump the triple jump, long jump and high jump on Saturday.

At Edward Little, meanwhile, the strategy remains the same: Win with many and win often.

“We are still the defending state champs,” coach Dan Campbell said. “We are down a bit, but we still feel we can be a factor.”

Sam Fletcher will lead a capable distance corps and Colby Brooks will anchor a strong sprint team. The key for a team beating the Eddies may indeed lie in flooding the jumping events. Still though, Campbell has hisv hopes, and the team’s, high.

“It would be nice to be able to say in our first year in the conference that we took both the boys’ and the girls’ title,” Campbell said. “I think there is a realistic chance of that happening.”

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