The Temple High School track and field teams will host the All-County Championships on Friday, where the Tigers will go against Bowdon, Mt. Zion and Heard County.

Temple coach Steve Robinson said the programs in Carroll County have made great progress, and this meet will be a showcase for some of those teams.

“It makes me feel good to see that we’re still growing and we’re still developing, and we all as a whole are getting better,” Robinson said. “That’s what this meet is really for, just to show that.”

And though the meet doesn’t include all the schools from Carroll County, Robinson said all are welcome.

“I’m just privileged to be able to have the facilities to have the meet. I want more teams to come. Over time I would love for more teams to come,” Robinson said. “I don’t want to exclude anybody. Anybody’s more than welcome to compete.”

Early in the season the Lady Tigers struggled, but junior Jasmine Lett said her team is hitting its stride.

“We’re where we should be, but we can always get better,” Lett said. “And throughout the season, all the meets that we’ve had, we’ve always beat our own personal times, and that’s our goal.”

And with the work Robinson has seen from his teams, he feels like the rest of this season and the future are shaping up well.

“We’re hard workers. We’ve got a lot of kids that are really peaking,” Robinson said. “And we’ve got a lot of kids that are extremely young.”

And for Bowdon, which doesn’t have its own track, the meet will serve as a good chance for its athletes to get experience in the type of facility in which they will have to compete in the postseason.

“We’re just hoping they’ll go in and get good practice out of it and make a good showing,” Red Devilette coach Melissa Ring said of her girls.

She expects Camry Morris, who placed in two events at state last season, and Jasmine Towns, who qualified for state, to have a chance to do very well on Friday.

Red Devil boys coach Jeff Herren said Avery Cheeks, Darious Moten and Chris Adams are some of his team’s guys with the best chance of scoring high finishes. He’s hoping the meet can build confidence for his group, which is still in the process of figuring out who works best in which events.

“We’re still a work-in-progress,” Herren said. “We’re still experimenting with what we can do to be a better team.”

Robinson said he has taken note of improvement in both Bowdon teams.

“You can see they’re just head-and-shoulders above where they were a year ago,” Robinson said.

He also continues to see a passion from his athletes for making a good showing for Temple whenever they hit the track.

“I’m proud of them, and when they perform on the track, you can really tell how much pride they have in their training and how much pride they have in the school that they’re representing and the community that they’re representing,” Robinson said.

And senior Dareius Copeland is just looking forward to seeing how the Tigers stack up as they approach their upcoming region meet, and he’s hoping to break some records along the way.

“That’s what we can get out of this: being ready for the regions because region’s coming up, and that really is what the bread and butter is,” Copeland said.

More than anything, Robinson hopes the event makes the communities of each school proud of what their teams were able to do.

“I just want this meet to be a success, which I have no doubt it’ll be because we’ve got great kids that are participating,” Robinson said. “At the end of the day, I want everybody to be able to stand together at that track meet and realize that they have gotten better from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.”