Friday was the final day for Community R-6 head coach and athletic director Trenton Pummill.

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Community R-6 qualified for three events in the Class 1 MSHSAA Track and Field Championships at Adkins Stadium in Jefferson City but didn’t make it out of the preliminary rounds on Day 1. Pummill accepted a job earlier this year to be the new assistant athletic director at Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis, making assistant Miranda Fennewald the new head coach next year.

“She’s been my assistant the past three years,” Pummill said. “She’s going to do a phenomenal job. She’s one of the best assistant coaches out there. She knows the ins and outs of how it works.”

Pummill said he still saw some solid performances at his final meet as a head coach. The boys 4x100-meter relay team of Lane Carter, Mason Carroll, Caden Thomas and Aaron Carter finished 14th with a time of 47.54 to miss finals the next day. However, that was the team’s third school record broken in three weeks.

In Pummill’s three years as coach, he said there hasn’t been a relay team that broke the school record at each step of the postseason — districts, sectionals and state. He does remember the girls 4x100-, 4x200- and 4x400-meter relay teams in his first year as an assistant under Carey Thomas break records in the postseason. 

“We had two sloppy handoffs at sectionals and still broke a school record,” Pummill said. “We cleaned them up (Thursday) morning actually after they came back from the (baseball) district semifinals (last Wednesday). We came in the next day and practiced handoffs in the hallway.”

Clean handoffs make a big difference in faster times, Pummill said, but when it comes to staying in the race. Four Class 1 boys 4x200 relay teams were disqualified after three exchanged out of the zone and one runner on the fourth team never received a handoff. 

The Trojans’ 4x200 relay team of the aforementioned four dual-sport athletes in the same order then finished 12th with a season-best time of 1:39.48. Pummill said the team with two seniors — Carroll and Aaron Carter — were just under two seconds from breaking that school record.

Alyssa Beamer is another senior that qualified for state for the first time and finished low in the standings at 16th place with a time of 2:52.38. Beamer gritted her way through to state, though, with a fourth-place finish at sectionals the previous week after trying her whole high school career.

“She set a goal out from her freshman year to make it to state,” Pummill said. “I couldn't be more proud of her for getting here. Getting a first-lane draw for an 800, you get boxed in immediately. It’s hard to come back from that. She got here, and that’s a testament to her hard work all these four years.”