AUSTIN — For Aubrey’s Steven Cantwell, last year’s track season ended in great disappointment.

Now a senior, Cantwell finished his high school athletic career on Saturday on a much better note. He took the silver medal with a time of 1:57.58 in the Class 2A boys 800-meter run at the UIL track and field state championships in front of an afternoon crowd of 12,200 people.

Cantwell entered the Class 2A Region II meet last year with the top qualifying time before a disappointing third-place finish that left him on the outside looking in for a state meet berth.

“I thought I was gonna go last year [to state],” Cantwell said. “I was disappointed, so this year I just wanted to go [to state] and win a medal.”

Cantwell started the race just wanting to finish at least third, but as the race went on, he realized he could finish in the top two spots and narrowly missed out on the gold by less than a second to Stanton’s AJ Lozano.

Cantwell ran much of the race in the back of the pack, staying between sixth and seventh place throughout the race, until the final 200 meters.

“I was in sixth place in the backstretch, and I passed the [runners with the] top two fastest [qualifying] times to get into third,” Cant-well said. “Then I thought I might just be able to take it all. If I had about two more meters, I would’ve gotten first.

“When I took off sprinting [in the final 200 meters], I was pretty sure I’d get third, which is what I was going for. With about 50 meters left I thought I could take it all.”

Cantwell said his strategy was to go out slower than he’s accustomed to doing, in order to let his opponents wear down in the heat and humidity.

“I ran a great race and ran exactly how I wanted to,” Cantwell said. “In my regional, I ran the first lap in about a 54 or 55 [seconds], and I died out at the end. I wanted to run a 56 or 57 in the first lap to not be so tired. The [runners with the] top two [qualifying] times all come out with like 54s in the first, so I was thinking if I got 57 and they go 54, they’d be pretty tired and I could catch them.”

Lady Chaps slip late in relay

What started out promising for the Aubrey girls 4x200 relay team ended with a shaky final handoff and a fifth-place finish with a time of 1:45.57, which was a fraction of a second slower than their regional time. The top four teams were bunched up within 0.12 seconds.

Leadoff leg Anaith Cisneros got Kristen Erp the baton in a virtual dead heat for first place, and Erp got third leg Kelly Gattuso the stick in second place.

On the final exchange, Gattuso handed off to Alex Gorzynski in third place, but Gorzynski appeared to take off too soon and had to wait on Gattuso. The exchange was legal, but it was enough to slow the Lady Chap-arrals on the final 200 meters and kept them out of the medals.

The same group teamed up for the final event of the 2A competition and finished seventh in the 4x400 relay with a time of 4:09.05, despite making a late push for sixth. The Lady Chap-arrals missed sixth place by 0.01 seconds.

Borchardt competes twice

Krum’s Coleby Borchardt scored for Krum with a sixth-place finish in the boys 2A 800 in a time of 1:59.92, which was two seconds slower than his time at the regional meet.

Borchardt also competed in the 400 just an hour and a half later and finished eighth with a time of 51.64.

Rochelle girl makes history

Bonnie Richardson ran. She threw. She jumped.

And when it was time to hand out the team trophies, Richardson accepted the 1A team championship for Rochelle High School — by herself.

Richardson was the only Roch-elle athlete to qualify for the state meet and stunningly won the team title. University Interscholastic League officials said it was the first time they can remember a single athlete winning a girls’ team title.

It’s happened before on the boys’ side, but not since former Baylor Bear and Pittsburg Steeler Frank Pollard did it for Meridian High School in the 1970s, said UIL athletics director Charles Breithaupt.

Richardson’s title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0).

On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Cole-man of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).

Rochelle is about 85 miles east of San Angelo.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

ADAM BOEDEKER can be reached at 940-566-6872. His e-mail address is aboedeker@dentonrc.com .