Mike Marshall led Salem High School to a third-place finish at the Class L state meet, while Pelham took part in the Class I-M-S competition as well.

On Sunday, Feb. 8, at Hanover’s Dartmouth College, the Blue Devils boys team scored 46 points, just two behind secondplace Londonderry. No team approached Nashua South, which won the title with 57 points.

Marshall won two individual races, grabbed a second-place finish and teamed with Ross Davies, Max Jacques and Jerickson Fedrick to win the 4x200 relay, having a hand in 38 of the team’s points.

“After the two-hour ride up, Mike went all over the place for the rest of the afternoon,” said head coach Todd Seastedt. “He was a busy boy.”

In addition to the relay, Marshall won the long jump and 55- meter hurdles and took second in the high jump.

“You have to be happy with the performance,” said Seastedt. “I spent the whole bus ride trying to find a few more points. Maybe you could look at another few points from (Marshall), but it’s nearly impossible to expect three gold medals from a kid. All of the kids performed well, and we couldn’t have gotten much stronger performances.”

The Salem girls finished 10th out of 13 teams, scoring 18 points on the afternoon.

Robyn Ciriello, Melissa Higgins and Stephanie Cabral all earned top-six finishes for Salem. Ciriello contributed 10 points in the shotput with a winning toss 35 feet, 7.5 inches, Higgins added six points, finishing third in the 300-meter dash at 41.39 seconds, and Cabral took fifth – and two points – in the 1,000-meter dash with a time of 3:10.38.

Pelham
The Pelham boys finished in the middle of the pack during the Class I-M-S event, ending the competition in 11th among 21 teams with 10 points.

Todd Paquin led the boys with a third-place long jump finish and a fourth-place effort in the 55-meter dash. He was also eighth in the 55-meter hurdles, during which he took a hard spill.

“He got a little ahead of himself, over-rotated, and that caused him to stumble. He had no choice but to get right back up and immediately run in the 55-meter dash finals,” said Jen Jaquith, one of Pelham’s coaches. “You would never know that Todd had fallen less than five minutes earlier when he ran his 55-meter dash.”

Cameron Robidoux battled an ankle injury he suffered the prior weekend at UNH, taking eighth in the 55- and 300-meter dash. Kelsi Lynde was sixth in the 55-meter hurdles and also ran on the sixth-place 4x400 relay team with Emily Long, Melody Long and Emily Spognardi, who placed sixth in the 1,500-meter race.