Submitted Photo Fredonia’s Bill Meister poses with the gold medal he won in the high jump and the bronze medal he won in the long jump at the 2018 Empire State Senior Games, held in Cortland June 9-16.

A Fredonia man won a gold medal in June at the Empire State Senior Games in Cortland.

Bill Meister, 78, topped the high jump event for the age 75-to-79 group. He also won a bronze medal in the long jump. He now has four medals at the annual event, winning gold in the 50-meter dash and silver in the long jump back in 2016.

“It did turn out well,” he said of his showing this year. “Better than I expected. I never anticipated how I would do.”

Meister, a 1958 graduate of Dunkirk’s Cardinal Mindszenty High School, did track and field there, as well as football, baseball and basketball.

He also ran track as a Marquette University freshman. “From there until just recently, I did nothing in that time span,” he said. “But a few years ago I started working out at the fitness center and it got me interested in getting fit. So I contacted the Empire State Games out of the blue. There wasn’t any long range plan of any sort.”

Shortly before moving from Florida, where he resided for 28 years, Meister was encouraged to put on track shoes again and enter Florida’s 2015 Senior Games. “A good friend of mine got involved in the Senior Games as a swimmer… he sort of challenged me,” he said. He wound up winning the 50-meter and the long jump events in his age group.

Meister was a project manager and vice president of a mechanical contracting company while in Florida. One of the company’s biggest clients was Disney World in Orlando. “I’d be out at Disney almost every day,” he said.

After he retired, he worked part-time for the Small Business Administration on hurricane damage estimates. He did that job in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Meister didn’t participate in the Empire State Games in 2017 because of a pulled hamstring, but said he was eager to go back to Cortland for this year’s event, held at the state university there.

“SUNY Cortland has outstanding facilities,” he said. “It’s run extremely well, all by local volunteers. There’s hundreds of participants.”

Meister is now eligible for a national Senior Games competition set for next year in New Mexico.