West Bloomfield track and field coach Lee Averill can still recall the conversation when, three years ago, he found out that Leslie Aririguzo was attending West Bloomfield, after competing for Southfield-Lathrup’s track team the previous school year.
“One of the football coaches said she was in his phys ed class,”
Averill recalled, “and I went home and looked at the regional results from the previous year and saw that she had won the 100 and had run on their relays that qualified for state.”
Undoubtedly, Aririguzo’s subsequent performances for the Lakers helped cement that early memory in Averill’s mind. Averill made Aririguzo a hurdler, and she responded by winning the 100 hurdles state championship in 2006. She finished third in the event last year then rebounded to win her second championship last Saturday.
Averill proved far-sighted when he shifted his sophomore from sprinting to, primarily, hurdling. Aririguzo had already displayed her prowess as a sprinter by finishing eighth in the state in the 200 as a freshman.
“I thought that with her speed and size and everything, that (hurdles) could be a good event for her,”
Averill said.
It certainly has been a very good event for her over the past three years. Aririguzo won her first 100 hurdles state title with a time of 14.24 seconds, then lowered her state meet time to 13.84 this year. She needed that four-tenths of a second improvement last Saturday because Detroit Cody’s Raven Clay took second in 14.14 seconds.
Aririguzo’s approach in Saturday’s final was “to stay focused, avoid distractions and just try to worry about my own race,”
she said. “In the beginning, she (Clay) kind of had a lead on me – I don’t know if she had a great start or I just had a bad start – but I didn’t let that faze me. I just focused and told myself to attack the hurdles.”
She passed Clay “at the seventh or eighth hurdle”
– out of a total of ten – and her sprinter’s speed secured the victory.
Asked if it was particularly special to regain her 100 hurdles title, Aririguzo responded, “I think so. Maybe because I’m a senior and I wanted to go out with a bang.”
Aririguzo’s track career is far from over, however. She’ll attend Virginia Tech on a track scholarship after signing her letter of intent earlier this year.
She chose Virginia Tech “because it’s a great school academically, and they have a really good track team,”
Aririguzo said. “The track team is ranked number six in the nation. And with the recruits coming in this year, they have a shot at winning the NCAA and I want to be a part of that.”
The Hokies won this year’s ACC indoor and outdoor championships and placed tenth in the NCAA indoor final.
She’ll run the 100 hurdles plus one other event, either the 200-meter run or the 400-meter hurdles, in college.
“It depends on which develops first, my 200 time or my 400 hurdles time,”
Aririguzo said.
She’ll run for her club team, Maximum Output, this summer, competing in the 100 hurdles, the 100 and 200 sprints and the 4 x 100 relay.
She’ll miss her Lakers track squad she said, but, as she did in the 100 hurdles last Saturday, Aririguzo is focused on her next goal.
“I’m looking forward to moving on to bigger and better things at the college level,”
she said.
