West Union to host 2026 Adams County Track Meets

West Union High School put Adams County’s track season on one stage Monday, hosting the 2026 Adams County Meet at 4:30 p.m. as the county’s runners, jumpers and throwers moved into the final stretch before district competition. The meet brought together athletes from West Union, North Adams, Manchester and Peebles at a time when every race and field event carried added weight, with girls district preliminaries set for May 19, boys district preliminaries for May 20 and district finals on May 23.

That timing mattered. The county meet fell just over two weeks before the first district preliminaries, making it a last local benchmark before the postseason narrowed the field. For families and coaches, the Monday start also meant one more coordinated trip to West Union, where the school had to handle traffic, parking and crowd flow for a countywide gathering rather than a single-school dual meet.

West Union was not an unfamiliar host. The school staged the annual West Union Invitational on April 9, 2024, when 13 teams competed, and again on April 15, 2025, when 11 schools came to town. Those meets showed the facility could absorb a full spring field and confirmed why West Union remains a practical site for one of Adams County’s largest athletic dates.

The county meet has rotated among local schools in recent years, which underlines how much the event depends on facilities that can support a full slate of sprints, distance races, relays, jumps and throws. Manchester hosted the Adams County Track Meet in 2024, and Peebles hosted it in 2019. Returning the meet to West Union in 2026 kept the tradition moving while keeping the action close to the center of the county.

Recent invitational results also showed the depth across the area. North Adams’ girls won the 2025 West Union Invitational with 114 points, while Manchester’s boys took that meet with 126. A year earlier, Fairfield won the girls title at West Union and North Adams claimed the boys crown. That kind of turnover is part of what makes the county meet matter: it is one of the few nights when all four schools measure themselves in the same place before the district and regional races begin to sort everyone out.