Nassau County Student Athletes Of The Week: Baldwin’s Sprinting Duo, Breanne Barnett and Savannah Stephenson

BALDWIN, NY — For most track teams, sending a runner to states in any event is an accomplishment worth celebrating. For Baldwin High School’s varsity track team, it wasn’t just one runner, it was two, in the same discipline, in the same year: Sprinters Breanne Barnett and Savannah Stephenson.

The duo started off the year with strong indoor showings; Barnett won the 300-meter state and federation championships and finished third in the state in the 55-meter dash, running those races in 38.09 seconds and 7.04 seconds, respectively.

Barnett was clipped by just two hundredths of a second in the 55-meter dash by a familiar face: Stephenson, who finished second with a 7:02 clip.

“They are very special people, because they're competing at such a high level,” Coach Sandra Cole told Patch.

The sprinting duo then followed the indoor season with a spring outdoor season that also ended at states. In the 1A 200-meter finals, it was the eleventh-grader Stephenson running a 24.34 and the senior Barnett running a 24.35, good for second and third in the state, respectively. Then, in the championship finals, Stephenson ran a blistering 24.13-second race, while Barnett brought her time down to 24.33.

Those 200-meter races were followed by Barnett finishing fourth in the 1A 200-meter dash finals, running a 56:14 before a 400-meter dash finals that saw her run a 59:23 and finish sixth.

For Stephenson, the highlight of the day may well have been in the 100-meter dash, where she ran a 12:16 in the prelims and then a 12:11 in the championship, which earned her a second-place finish.

"I am very proud of them. They put in a lot of hard work, and it's even more so for Breanne," Cole told Patch in a March interview. "Breanne is really a true student-athete, in every sense of the word. She works really, really hard on and off the track."