Thursday, October 1, 2026
The final event literally vaulted the Hewlett girls’ spring track and field team to the Nassau Class AA county title.
Junior Maree Drayling won the deciding pole vault and senior Jayden Yochai and sophomore Ella Findling finished second and fifth, respectively, as the Bulldogs collected 20 points in the event to ‘vault’ over four schools and claim the program’s tenth county title and first since 2018 on May 19.
Sophomores Janee Llanos (triple jump) and Valeria Paez (800-meter run) also won county titles to help Hewlett, which hosted the meet, finish with 73 points, eight clear of defending-champion Calhoun.
“We were sixth on paper if you look at all the seeds going in, so we didn’t have to jump just over one team, we had to jump over five,” Hewlett coach Stephen Honerkamp said. “But we did it in every event that we were in. We all jumped up and did better than we were supposed to.”
Hewlett, which was hosting its first spring county championship, entered the last event of the day – the pole vault – in a fourth-place tie with Garden City with 53 points. Calhoun and Manhasset were tied for first at 61 and Roosevelt sat third with 55.
Drayling clinched the event after the remaining competitors failed to clear 8 feet 6 inches, but she went on to reach a personal-record 9-2. Yochai reached eight feet on her first attempt and Findling did it on her third try to break her personal record.
“They have two county titles each, so I knew their experience going into it was going to really be a strength,” Honerkamp said of Drayling and Yochai. “They would be able to handle that stressful situation because they’ve been there before.”
Llanos’ first leap of 34-11 stood up in the triple jump, but she later reached 36 feet for her longest ever. She also PR’d while finishing fourth in the long jump (15-7) and placed the same in the 100-meter hurdles final.
“She had a tremendous day,” Honerkamp said. “She was hurdling well, struggling a little with the jumps, but we saw good potential in her so we just stuck with it. She got really competitive, and it’s weird because there was such a strong head wind that day, they were really jumping into the wind.”
Paez trailed early in the 800-meter final, but eventually beat Great Neck North’s Janeidy Da Silva by three-tenths of a second. She also finished second in the 2,000-meter steeplechase with a personal-best and school-record time of 7 minutes, 29.81 seconds.
“Valeria is just a tremendous competitor,” Honerkamp said. “We put her in the steeplechase two days before counties because we knew we had to do something different if we had a chance to win. But knowing what kind of kid she is, I knew she could probably handle it.”
Senior Maeve Williams was third in the discus with a personal-record 89-3 and junior Layla Michel finished fourth in the high jump with a personal-best 4-8 and fifth in the shot put.
The 4x100 relay team of Emily Piotrowski, Gabriella and Grace Kennedy and Jada Lawrence finished fourth with a team-record time of 51.97.
