Clovis Invitational

This past Saturday, our two varsity teams traveled to Woodward Park in Fresno for the 38th annual Asics Clovis Invitational.  The meet is one of the biggest and most prestigious in California and is considered a "State Meet Preview", as it is run on the same course as the state championship meet.  As a team, we had our best day ever, for the Clovis meet

Varsity Girls, 7:15 AM
The girls had to get to the park by 6:00 AM to start warming up for their early morning race.  I've never been to a meet where kids need flashlights to run their warm ups.  The park was a little bit magical with packs of light floating around in the dark as the different teams went about their pre race preparation.

In our race were Division 4 State #1 Mayfield (Pasadena) and #7 Piedmont (Oakland).  We were also joined by Perennial State Powers, McFarland of Disney movie fame, Paraclete of Orange County, and St. Mary's of Berkeley.  Also in the race were 5 teams that were ranked in the state's top 10 for Division 5.

A unique feature of such a large meet is that they can provide computerized, mid meet score updates so that coaches can know how their teams are faring at the 1 mile and 2 mile marks. Each athlete runs with a timing chip and when the athletes pass the mile and 2 mile points, the race computer automatically records their times and calculates a team score.

Our girls continued to run how they have run all year long....pacing themselves smartly and moving up aggressively late in the race.  This is the strategy we used to beat Riverbank at our last TVL meet and this was the strategy we followed on Saturday.

At the one mile mark, the announcer read out the top 10 teams, and we were not among them.  By the 2 mile mark, we had moved up to 8th.  By the finish, we had climbed all the way to 5th out of 29 teams competing.  For a frame of comparison, TVL Rivals Escalon, Ripon, and Hilmar were 22nd, 25th, and 28th in the very competitive field.  Mayfield High showed why they are the State #1 team by winning the race by 70 points over a very good Piedmont team.  McFarland and St. Marys, along with our girls, rounded out the top 5.

Our girls were led by Freshman Kinsey Langely, as they have been all season.  However, it was the fact that the rest of our girls are starting to catch up to her that allowed us to place so high.  Kinsey improved her best time for 5k by 20 seconds, a nice improvement, but Emily Fife and Esmeralda Campos improved by 55 seconds and Abby Mitchell improved by 50 seconds.  Taylor Gray improved her best time by 19 seconds and Heavyn Herroz improved her best time by 10 seconds. Priscilla Fernandez also competed for us, but has been battling a foot injury and was a little bit off from her best effort.

Varsity Boys, 7:45 AM
Our boys have had a difficult time this year.  TVL #2 had been a significant improvement for them, but they were looking for more improvement.....and we got it.  Daniel Yanez ran a very tough race to finish 19th overall in a time of 16:35 for the 3.1 mile course (an average of about 5:18 per mile).  This time ranks as #3 on our all time list of on the course.  The time also marks a 45 second improvement from his time at the invitational last year and 17 seconds faster than his time from last year's state championship meet.  He had a good race, to say the least.  Carson Boice and Josue Esquivel also had major improvements.  Josue has knocked a minute off of his best time in each of the last 2 races and is now able to start running with our top group of Yanez, Boice, and Jaymie Jackson.  Jaymie Jackson also managed a small improvement of 4 seconds from his previous personal best for 5k.

Also setting small improvements were Garrett Hartman (5 seconds faster than his previous best time) and Dalton Santiesteban (3 seconds faster than his previous best time).  Mark Borges ran another good race, but fell one second short of bettering his time for the 5k distance.

The boys ended up finishing 12th out of 29 teams competing.  TVL Rivals Escalon, Ripon, and Hilmar were 25th, 26th, and 29th respectively.  The race was won by current state D5 #1 team (and perhaps the best small school team in California History) Flintridge Prep of La Canada.  Sage Creek of San Diego (ranked 4th in state division 4 was second). McFarland was 3rd, University High of San Francicso (Ranked 4th in State Division 5) was 4th and Oaks Christian (perennially ranked high in the state, but not in the rankings yet this year) placed 5th.

Team Splits