Five Newton boys, PCM’s Chipps to compete at Drake Relays

Five Newton Cardinals and PCM’s Margo Chipps will be part of the annual Drake Relays next week.

The high school portion of the Drake Relays will take place on Thursday only this year. And crowds inside Drake Stadium also will be significantly reduced because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the first time in Relays history though, all eight hours of Thursday’s high school coverage can be seen on Mediacom’s MC22 channel. Most of the rest of the Drake Relays can be viewed on runnerspace.com.

The first area athletes to perform at the Drake Relays will be Newton’s boys 4x800 relay team. The foursome of junior Derek Beiner, freshman Cody Klein and juniors Treycen Garton and Jackson Mace-Maynard will compete at 10:33 a.m.

Mace-Maynard will be back on the blue oval at 2:08 p.m. to run in the 800-meter run. Mace-Maynard had the 17th best time in an event that takes just 16 but four runners ahead of him dropped out of the race because they were in other events, too.

Mace-Maynard now has the 13th best time in the event among athletes who will be competing in the 800.

Newton junior Keith Moko will compete in the boys high jump at 2 p.m.

Chipps is back in the Drake Relays in another hurdle event. This time, the UNI recruit will compete in the girls 100 hurdles at 1:31 p.m.