WASHINGTON, Jan. 25, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- When Dunbar High School opened its doors in 1977, the Crimson Tide Classic Invitational was a hugely successful track meet. However, a deteriorating track took that luster away, and to most the event had become a distant memory.
Thirty-one years later, Dunbar High School Head Track and Field Coach Marvin Parker plans to refresh those memories -- in a big way. This year will mark a new beginning for the Crimson Tide Classic. "There's no doubt in my mind that on April 5th we will blow them away with our new facilities," said Parker.
The first African-American high school in the country, Dunbar High is rich in history. They've also been a leading athletic force, dominating football for the last ten years, and have won 6 DCIAA Championships in Track and Field in the last 3 years.
After persevering through years of declining facilities, Dunbar's stadium underwent a complete modernization in 2007 as part of an enormous D.C. Public Schools improvement project. The nearly $6 million in additions include new bleachers, a press box, concession stands, fencing, bathroom facilities, and a top-of-the-line Le Monde track surface and FieldTurf field.
Waiting nearly three decades for a new track, Coach Parker wanted to be 100% confident in his choice for Dunbar's program. Visits to numerous regional schools finally lead him to Princeton University -- where he was convinced.
"We saw Princeton's Le Monde track surface and it was fast. The engineering that went into this is product top-notch," said Parker. "What I like about it is that it doesn't puddle like the Mondo tracks. The drainage is perfect and it is distance-runner friendly, something the Mondo track is not."
Launched in 2006, Le Monde was engineered to succeed where other sheet goods had failed. Traditional sheet goods are well-known to be hard surfaces and painful to run on. Le Monde's blend of a softer base layer and a firm top layer provides the athlete with an extremely fast surface that at the same time gives excellent comfort for distance runners. Deep drainage channels that flow laterally across the surface quickly remove rain, and overlapping seams add to the superior construction of Le Monde.
"Le Monde is designed around the athlete to work in tandem with the athlete," says Kevin Swank, FieldTurf Tarkett's Track Division Manager. "The shoes that the athletes wear are changing every day, while the surface that they run on has not changed in decades. Le Monde provides a durable surface that is designed to be used at every level of competition, from grade school to national championships, and it is manufactured and designed by the same people who developed FieldTurf."
"We are just excited about the re-birth of D.C. Track and Field, bringing prestige back to D.C. high schools. This meet will finally get area schools to come back to the city, breed better competition in the area, and give these kids the same level of exposure as those in Maryland and Virginia," added Parker. "Now, we've got these beautiful facilities, a beautiful track surface -- we're excited about competing on it, and I'm sure everyone else will be excited to run some fast times too. The FieldTurf field is gorgeous, the track surface is gorgeous. We've got a real class-A situation here."
On top of Dunbar's athletic prominence, every athlete on the track & field team displays academic excellence. All of Coach Parker's athletes are on the honor roll, and in an astonishing feat, every young athlete who has competed for him has gone to college on a full scholarship. "That's the achievement I'm most proud of -- seeing these kids go on to get a great education."