In late April, a couple of days before the NEW 6 Conference track & field championship meet, Rocky Mount High boys' coach Dee Anna Davis studied her lineup and realized that, in order to afford her team its best opportunity to win the conference crown, she would need to do something that most coaches would not comprehend, much less execute. She would have little choice but to enter Jacobi Jenkins, the star sprinter and hurdler for the Gryphons, in four individual events.

No matter how smart and how strong and how chiseled they might be – and Jenkins, a senior this season for the Gryphons, is smart, strong and particularly chiseled – few high school athletes are able to compete in four individual events at any meet. Fewer still are able to sprint to the front of the pack and win all four. Granted, Jenkins did not win all four events at the conference meet.

No, he won only three.

He finished second in the fourth. By one one-hundredth of a second.

Oh, and the Gryphons won the conference title, their first in 12 years.

"We asked him to do some things this year that weren't all that fair," Davis said.

Like compete in the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and the 110 high and 300 hurdles at that conference championship meet, a total of eight races at full speed in an afternoon. But Jenkins answered the call.

He answered it again two weeks later, during the NCHSAA 3-A Eastern Regional meet, when he finished first in the 300 hurdles and narrowly lost to rival Danny Allen, a junior at Nash Central, in the 110 high hurdles. And again a week after that at the 3-A state championship meet, when he won a state title in the 110 high hurdles.

In the end, a couple of weeks before he starts to work out officially with the East Carolina football team, all of that proved to be more than enough for Jenkins to be voted the Telegram All-Area Boys' Track & Field Athlete of the Year.

Jenkins started to work toward his state championship and this last award a little more than four years ago, when he walked on to the football field to play for Rocky Mount High and coach B.W. Holt. The old coach liked the young defensive back, but Holt said he wanted Jenkins to run track during the winter and the spring in order to remain in top shape.

"At first, I didn't like track," Jenkins said. He did not care for the long practices and the dozens of sprints each afternoon. "But when I found we were competing against other people, well, I'm really a competitor. I had no other choice but to fall in love with it."

So he worked through the stretches, the sprints, the afternoons filled with 16 100-meter dashes, a mile worth of all-out effort around the track, and all the hurdle drills.

"And then I had to do the same workout as the sprinters," Jenkins said. "I was doing the workouts of two people. But I can't complain.

"All that work got me a state championship."

Now, with Jenkins on his way to Greenville, Davis said she is able to put his accomplishments in the proper perspective.

"We are going to lose a lot with him," she said.

"Athletes like him don't come around often."

Matt LaWell can be reached at 407-9952 or mlawell@coxnc.com