During her sophomore season, Gabi Allen’s times at the Mid-State Conference track meet were good enough to break the previous meet records. That she still didn’t win any of those events was a perfect summation of her high school career coming into this spring.
“She’s always kind of had a knack for being overshadowed,” Whiteland coach Brandon Bangel said. “Even when she does great things — she’ll set a meet record, but somebody else beats her.”
After being pushed to the background by such superstars as Center Grove sprinter Kiyah Yeast in 2018 and 2019 and having her junior season wiped out by a pandemic, Allen has finally got the spotlight focused on her this year. She’s been rewriting the sprinting section of the Warriors’ record book, and she was named the top girls performer at last week’s Johnson County meet, winning both the 100- and 200-meter dashes and notching runner-up finishes in the 100 hurdles and the 4×100 relay.
Keeping in line with her long-running storyline, Allen’s second-place time of 15.04 seconds in the hurdles — she lost to Center Grove’s Makensie Kramer by .08 seconds — was been good enough to break the previous county meet record. But while she narrowly missed out on the opportunity to sweep her three individual events, Allen was happy to have the opportunity to see where she and her Whiteland teammates stack up against the county champion Trojans, who are ranked among the top three teams in Indiana.
“It definitely gave me a range of where I fall in the state,” Allen said. “Seeing all the other teams, it makes us works a lot harder.”
With hard work over the next few weeks, beginning with the Mid-State Conference meet on Tuesday night, Allen could put herself in position to do some big things this postseason. Because of the order of events, Bangel seems likely to keep the senior star out of the 100 come sectional time to improve her odds of advancement in the 100 hurdles and the 200.
The coach believes that her chances in the former are particularly good; Allen’s county hurdles time of 15.04 is fourth in Indiana this season and would have tied for 11th at the 2019 state meet, and the feeling is that she can go a good bit lower with some more training time and without having to worry about back-to-back events.
“She is going to be really, really good by the end of the season in the 100 hurdles,” Bangel said. “People are going to know who she is.”
For her part, Allen (who’s also fifth in the state this season in the 200) doesn’t really seem all that worried about getting people’s attention. Her collegiate future secured — she’s verbally committed to continue running at Marian University — Allen just wants to keep getting better.
“I want to go to state, obviously, and I then I definitely want to try and push past my records and break those before I leave,” she said.
If she does that, there’s a decent chance that we’ll see Allen standing on the state podium in at least one event a month from now.
The anonymity that cloaked her as an underclassman is quickly disappearing.
“There’s always been somebody else,” Bangel said. “Now she’s kind of in the limelight, and she’s getting better every race.”
