Padraic Duffy, Journal staff

RAPID CITY - Central sprinter Jasmyne King is going to break the state record in the 400 meters. It's just a matter of when.

The sophomore capped the Pierre Legion Relays with a 55.48-second clocking in the event - the fastest time ever recorded in the state for a girl - to give her four wins and three meet records on Friday. King added wins in the 100- and 200-meter dashes and anchored the winning 4-by-400-meter relay team to give her four wins on the day. The 200, 400 and relay wins were all also meet records. For that effort King has been named the Rapid City Journal Athlete of the Week.

"We knew that it was a fast track in Pierre," King said. "We kind of expected that some of the times would be pretty good."

King's time is actually better than the 55.49-second record held by Mitchell's Jill Theeler, but Theeler's time came at the 1997 state meet with fully-automatic timing. King's time was hand-held, so after adjustments it is likely that her Friday run will go down as the second-fastest 400 ever run by a high school girl in South Dakota. Either way, it's a major accomplishment and a personal-record that she expects to be breaking sooner rather than later.

"For sure it's the second fastest all-time," Central head track and field coach Dave Dolan said. "Now we just need to break it, F.A.T. time or whatever, and I think she will. Her goal is to get under 55 (seconds). That's been our goal all year and I think we've got the ability to get there."

King thinks so, too.

"Technically I didn't really get it, yet, hopefully soon though," King said of the state record. "I'm hoping to break it at Howard Wood. That's kind of what we're shooting for."

The quest to become not just the record-holder in South Dakota, but a major competitor on the national level, is just one of the reasons that King, a four-time gold medal winner at last year's Class AA meet as a freshman, has stayed highly motivated.

"I feel good about where I'm at for our state meet and meets that I'll go to after our state meet," King said. "And we want to win a state team title. That's a big goal and we feel like we have some doors opening for us there."

King ran a 55.8-second 400 last year as a freshman at the Nike Outdoor National Championships in Greensboro, N.C. She hopes to be somewhere in the 54-second range when she goes back this year.

"I'm hoping to go 54.7 or 54.8," King said. "There are some fast girls out there. Fifty-four would put me in there, but not at the top."

King will be running in the Black Hills Track Classic Special 400 this weekend in Sturgis before heading east for the Howard Wood Relays the next weekend. While it seems, in all honesty, that there isn't much competition for her this year in the quarter-mile, King and her coaches know she's a marked woman.

"The 100 is a stressful race," Dolan said. "It's so quick that if you have any kind of mistake getting out of the blocks, you're probably going to get beat. There are plenty of girls in the state that are fast enough to beat her if she stumbles a bit. In the 400 she's got time to make up for a mistake early, but the 100 is a different story."

That's the biggest reason that King calls the 400 her favorite race.

"It's not fun to run, but it is my favorite race," King said. "I like it. It's not a sprint, there's time to make up for an error. If something went wrong coming out of the blocks you have time to make it up, unlike the 100."

Luckily for King there doesn't seem to be much going wrong when she runs. And that's why she's going to be a state record-holder - sooner rather than later.