Most species of birds travel in a V-shaped formation with the leader at the point, determining the route, direction and speed. The configuration is efficient, reducing drag by upwards of 60 to 70 percent, and is the most commonly used military flight pattern as a result. Being the leader means keeping the formation intact, navigating the group through obstacles and knowing what’s ahead.

For the Southside boys’ track team, Tyriek Gaskins is the point. The Seahawks’ senior captain piloted a flock of 23 athletes, one of the highest totals to qualify in school history, onto Irwin Belt Track at North Carolina State A&T for the NCHSAA 1-A state championships on Friday. Weaving around obstructions and elevating hurdles, Gaskins left Greensboro with two state championships after a dominating performance in the 200-meter dash and assisting in the 4-by-200-meter relay team’s top finish. As a team, Southside scored 34 points, good enough to take third overall.

Finishing second behind Lejeune for the Coastal Plains Conference crown and fourth in the eastern region, Southside was an unquestioned underdog entering Friday. The 23 state qualifiers gave them a fighting chance at a top-five finish, but Quinerly knew that in order for the team to be successful, guys like Gaskins, Lawrence Brown and Ronald Dennis would need to have their best outings of the season.

After sneaking into the top eight in the preliminaries of the 100-meter dash, Gaskins laid everything on the line for the final race, improving his initial time by 0.30 seconds and locking up third place (11.16). The race set the tone for the 200-meter dash, the captain’s signature event.

“Before every kid runs or jumps, I say a little prayer. I basically say, ‘Let them get what they earned. Let them perform to the best of their ability,’” said head coach Andrea Quinerly. “I knew if he ran his best he was going to win this. I felt very confident going into it.”

Lining up against some of the top talent in the state, including Camden County’s Trevor Carr and Bessemer’s Isaiah Cole, Gaskins torched the competition, edging Carr by 0.10 of a second and winning the championship with a time of 22.65.

But he wasn’t finished.

As the anchor to the 4-by-200 relay team, Gaskins, along with Brown, sophomore Zikayah Crawford and senior Raquan Ward, was an unlikely pick to take home gold. But having calibrated handoffs in practice, the Seahawks shook off the prerace nerves and pieced together a dominant relay, winning the state championship with a time of 1:31.40.

“It feels good, like everything that I worked for was accomplished,” Gaskins said. “We’ve been working on handoffs basically every practice. I thought everyone would get nervous and slip up at states. I know I was real nervous, but we all had a good handoff and kept up our speed.”

While gifted with natural agility, the season has been a work in progress for the team’s leader, who is also a guard on the Seahawks’ basketball team. Gaskins didn’t run track his junior year, but that didn’t stop him from earning the title captain in 2015. In his second season as boys’ track and field coach, Quinerly’s decision to give Gaskins the reins was an easy one.

“He told me halfway through the season last year, he said, ‘Coach, I’ll be out there next year,’” Quinerly recalled. “As soon as basketball was over, he was out there the next day and hit the track running. He never stopped.”

Picking a captain is “something I do on my own. I watch them from workouts to practice all the way up until the first meet. He came out there and was the first one to do everything — directed everyone and was just a natural leader the second he stepped onto the track. Every kid out there, when he spoke, they listened.”

To prepare for competitive meets, the coaches ran each practice like an unorganized competition, relying on certain student leaders to direct their peers. During those practices, Gaskins challenged teammates to races and, ultimately, improved their times in the process, while also helping some of the slower sprinters better themselves as runners. In a sport with one of the highest turnover rates, not one athlete that fell under Gaskins’ wing, mostly sprinters, quit.

“He was very much the glue to the team,” Quinerly said. “He kept the kids out there, treated everyone with respect — from relay partners to the slowest person on the team … It’s a sport where you have 70-some kids out there and just a few coaches, so you look for them to coach themselves and be self disciplined. He was like the unofficial coach out there.”

Gaskins did, in fact, propel the team to a top-three finish, but there were other athletes whose times contributed a point here and there to the Southside total.

Others who non-alternates competed for the Seahawks were Eminey Redmond, Nancy Walker, Keegan Wiggins, Tranella Norman, Nakeya Johnson, Kinyara Daniels, Carrington James, Dennis, Breanna Godwin, Shamari Walters, Joe Myers, Will Mumford, Levonta Grimes and Rae’kwon Mourning.