The Rugby High School track and field teams may not have been able to get outside for any practices, but it didn’t stop the Panthers from winning their first meet of the year.

Rugby’s boys (165) outpaced runner-up Killdeer (107) by 58 points to win the CDNC Indoor Meet at the Minot State University Dome.

The Rugby girls were even more dominant, taking the CNDC with 168.5 points, 99 more than runner-up Langdon.

“I think we found out some things about some young kids and some older kids,” Rugby boys coach Scott Grochow said. “You could definitely tell we haven’t been able to get out and really do a lot. It was nice to just get out and compete and see where you’re at. When you practice, sometimes you just don’t know where you’re at either. Let the competitive juices get flowing a little bit and see what happens. I thought it was a pretty good meet. We did some nice things, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

The Rugby boys had a number of individual event winners starting with Nigel Hageness, who took the 55-meter dash in 6.39 seconds.

Teammate Chris Hamilton won the 200 in 25.00 and the Panthers 3,200 relay team of Kris Leier, Bennie Mygland, Trevor Longie and Jaedon Haman also earned top honors in a running event.

In the field events, Josh Michels tied for first in the high jump, Tanner Bernhardt won the triple jump and Victor Gronvold took the pole vault.

Grochow has both some young athletes and some athletes new to track and is still early in the process of finding out where everyone will fit.

“You have some pleasant surprises in there,” Grochow said. “They were all over the board. We had some kids that did some things we weren’t expecting and then, on the other hand, there were some kids that we might have to take a look at them doing something different.”

Aubrey Hovland paced the way for the Panthers on the girls side, winning two individual events and a third as a part of a relay team.

Hovland won the 55 hurdles and led off Rugby’s winning 400 relay team, taking the win with teammates Hannah Christenson, Shanaya Fred and Emily Stier.

She also won the high jump, leaping 4-foot-11, and placed second in the long jump.

“Aubrey had a really nice day,” Rugby girls coach Bill Jansen said.

Rugby swept the relays as the team of Christenson, Foster, Kaitlyn Jones and Karin Selland won the 1,600 relay by more than five seconds.

Foster, Tristin Lunde, Alexis Thompson and Lauren Christenson grabbed top honors in the 3,200 relay.

“We just have a lot of kids that we wanted to look at,” Jansen said. “We need to get on a track, get in an event, get through the jitters of being at a meet, going through all of the ins and outs of going to a meet. I was pleasantly surprised.”

More than anything, the first meet was a chance to get used to competition.

“We’ve got some younger girls, some that had never been to a track meet, that did some nice things,” Jansen said.

Aside from Hovland, the Panthers had a number of competitors place in the jumps and throws, but no other winners.

“We saw that we have some kids in all areas, so I think going to be solid all-around, in all the event areas,” Jansen said.