Alice Unified Wins State 4x100 Relay Gold Medal Glory

Haley Salinas, Kendall Leal, Brooke Castillo and Victoria Diaz put Alice Unified on top of the state 4x100 relay field, delivering a gold-medal finish that gave Alice High School one of its biggest spring sports moments and gave Jim Wells County a rare statewide celebration.

The victory carried weight well beyond the final exchange. Special Olympics Texas’ Unified Sports model brings athletes with intellectual disabilities and athletes without intellectual disabilities onto the same team for training and competition, and UIL’s Unified Track & Field program places that idea inside a formal statewide championship structure for member schools with the proper inclusion partnership on file. In other words, this was not an exhibition or a feel-good run. It was a state title earned in a real championship setting.

For Alice Independent School District, the result reflected more than speed. A relay demands baton work, timing, trust and composure, and those are built over weeks of practice with coaches, teammates, classmates and families all pulling in the same direction. That is what made the Alice Unified win resonate on campus and across town. It showed student-athletes succeeding in a format designed to widen opportunity, not narrow it.

The title also fit into a longer Alice relay tradition that local readers already know. Earlier Alice Echo-News Journal coverage followed an Alice 4x200 relay team that punched its ticket to state after a silver-medal finish, and a 2022 girls 400-meter relay team that broke a school record. Against that backdrop, the Unified 4x100 gold looked less like a one-day surprise and more like the latest chapter in a program that has repeatedly found ways to perform under pressure.

UIL’s broader championship structure, which oversees region and state competition across 14 sports, gave the victory added significance because it placed Alice on the same statewide stage as the rest of Texas athletics. For a community that lives and dies with its local schools, the relay win offered something powerful: a medal, a milestone and a visible reminder that inclusion can also be championship-level competition.

In a county that often sees its headlines dominated by harder news, Alice Unified’s gold stood out for a different reason. It was a win built on school pride, shared effort and a finish that will stay part of Alice athletics for a long time.