Severna Park’s Williams, Broadneck’s Rivas Win Individual Indoor Titles

When high jumper Matthew Williams woke up on the morning of the 3A state indoor track meet, it was already a good day to go for gold.

He’d had a great night of sleep, great carb load the night before, an energy drink at the ready — his ideal prep.

Oh, and the meet fell on his 18th birthday.

“Everything felt really good,” Williams quipped.

Fate smiled on the Severna Park senior, as he cleared 6-foot-4 to match his personal best set a week prior. Three others did it within the allotted three attempts, but only Williams did it on the first try.

At 6-foot-6, all four failed on the first two tries. Then the first two failed their last attempt. Williams went and just clipped the bar, leaving one more jumper, Samuel Cooper of Tuscarora, who had already cleared 6-foot-8 this season.

But he too failed, and with the tiebreak being fewest jumps required to clear the previous height, Williams joined his older brother Kian as a high jump state champion.

“It was a nervous wait. I’m friends with a lot of the jumpers, and we’re in group texts and all of that,” Williams said. “You’re never rooting for someone else to fail, so there wasn’t a big celebration or anything like that. I don’t think it actually sank in that I won until we were almost home.”

In the 4A boys pole vault, Cooper Rivas had no such dramatics in his championship quest. The Broadneck junior didn’t even enter the field until the bar was at 12-foot-6, half a foot higher than anyone else in the field had cleared before using their allotted three misses on the same height.

Alone in his attempts, Rivas managed the spotlight and the change in tempo well to get as high as 13-2, 14 inches ahead of second place but five inches off his personal best.

“It was good and bad,” Rivas said of performing alone for his entire participation in the pole vault. “There was one other vaulter who was going to jump with me and hopefully we would pace each other, but he got hurt. I didn’t do as well as I think I could have, but it was good because I managed my tempo and enjoyed getting the win.”

Rivas and Williams both expressed optimism of getting new personal records in the upcoming outdoor season. Williams is going for 6-foot-6, which he narrowly missed at the state meet, while Rivas has been nearing 15 feet in practice.