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Records, they say, are made to be broken.
That is particularly true with track and field records. Today’s athletes are generally better trained and better equipped to succeed than athletes of days gone by. Of the 20 current high school girls track and field events, more than half of the all-time South Dakota records were set in the past 10 years.
One former Watertown High School athlete, however, has been waiting 50 years for someone to break her record.
No one has.
After high school, Stormo Freund enjoyed a hall-of-fame track career at the University of Iowa. Courtesy photo.
Kay Stormo, a 1978 WHS graduate, set a South Dakota high school girls record for the 880-yard run as a freshman in 1975. She lowered that record several times during her Arrow career, posting a best time of 2:08.4 as a senior, which is 2:07.9 when converted to the current 800-meter format.
That is nearly 2½ seconds faster than any high school girl has managed over those 50 years.
Now Kay Stormo Freund, she is retired after a career with IBM and divides her time between homes in Georgetown, Texas, and Salem, Ore., with her husband, Britt Freund. She still keeps tabs on the high school track scene in South Dakota.
“I’ve cheered for quite a few girls to break my record, but I don’t check every year.” she told the Watertown Current. “There have been, I’d guess, 10 kids who have done really well in middle distance, and I would cheer for every one of them.
“In 2007, maybe, I went with my dad to Howard Wood Relays and just cheered and cheered for a girl.”
That runner didn’t break Stormo Freund’s record, but the level of competition impressed her.
“I was just amazed at how close the races were and how fast they were. That’s really cool, because my memory of running many races was that they weren’t super close. The nearest runner was usually 10 seconds behind me.”
Even though her record was set 50 years ago, she believes it will not last much longer.
“Absolutely it will be broken,” she said. “I don’t want to name names, because it’s not really fair to put that pressure on them,” she said. “But the young kids coming up – they’re fast, so I think it’s inevitable that it will be broken.”
Stormo Freund, who grew up on a farm in Hamlin County, led Watertown High School to the state track title in 1978 and runner-up finishes in 1976 and ’77. She earned 18 state-meet medals, including 10 golds. In track meets, she usually ran in three relays and the open mile. As a sophomore in 1976, Watertown won every race final that she ran.
Her 1978 state track meet performance was voted the outstanding athletic performance across all South Dakota prep sports in 1978 by the S.D. Sportswriters Association. At that meet Stormo Freund anchored the two-mile and medley relays to state records, set a state record in the mile and anchored the winning mile relay. Watertown’s state medley relay record lasted for more than 25 years.
Kay Stormo is guarded by Karen McDonald of Pierre in a girls basketball game. McDonald later moved to Watertown and still holds the longest discuss through in S.D. high school girls history. Courtesy photo.
In basketball, she was a three-time all-state center and helped the Arrows win the 1976 state title. One day in her senior year, she won the ESD cross country meet in record time and later had 25 points and 13 rebounds in a basketball victory over Pierre.
After high school, she competed for the University of Iowa in cross country, indoor track and outdoor track for four years. She was a four-time Big Ten Conference champion and a three-time All-American.
Stormo Freund is a member of the Watertown High and University of Iowa Track halls of fame.
She competed in a time when Watertown High School did not have an all-weather track and ran on the old cinder track at the stadium.
“I think that actually helped,” she said, “because after running on cinders, when you got on an all-weather track, you felt like you could just fly.”
She also said she is amazed that today’s runners get new track shoes seemingly every month or so. She used the same pair of spikes for her entire high school career.
“I still have them,” she said. “They’re in my little trophy area.”
The only South Dakota all-time record older than Stormo Freund’s is in the high jump, where Joan Brockhaus of Rosholt recorded a height on 5 feet, 10½ inches in 1977. No jumper has topped that mark since.
