Prep sports: Track and field has a challenge

University City's boys relay team at the UC Track Classic
April 16, 2019. (Photo by Ed Piper)

By Ed Piper

Track, it seems, has a more difficult challenge than team sports like baseball in what may follow after high schools resume classes and sports this spring--if they resume either one.

Paul Byrne, La Jolla High's head track coach, talked Sat., March 14, considered the likelihood of track resuming this spring. "There are pros and cons both ways," said the veteran coach who specializes in pole vault, as far as trying to restart the season or not.

With meets cancelled the next three weeks, when classes won't be held in City Schools, and meets beyond that already cancelled, Byrne realized that a big chunk of the spring track season will already be lost.

"Obviously, if we come back and have a season, I'll do everything I can" to make it work, he said.

But Byrne, a teacher on campus, also has a major event looming in his family: the birth of his second child, with his wife's due date this Sat., March 21. So he has other things on his mind right now than whether a track season will be possible.

Baseball, for instance, can ramp back up in a week or two (MLB's projected second "Spring Training" when it starts the regular season). Track, though, can't make up weeks of training and meets.

University City High running coach Gimi McCarthy, reached by phone Monday afternoon, March 16, was much more glum than the LJHS coach.

"It's my whole life," McCarthy, the Centurions' head cross country coach and a track assistant, said, taking a break from cleaning his house on the first weekday of cancelled classes. "I'm a little bummed. I'm a lot bummed."

McCarthy is not only a coach for athletes like UC senior Bryce Kueker, 13th in the state cross country championships, and junior Katrina Wright, state champion in the 400 meters (53.93), but also a ceramics teacher whose art students will be cut out of "some events for the community" that McCarthy was looking forward to.

Because of the San Diego Unified School District's cancellation of classes until April 6, announced Fri., March 13, University City had to cancel its UC Track Classic. Byrne pre-emptively cancelled the Viking Relays. And Coach Danny Perez at Mission Bay cancelled the Jim Cerveny Invitational.

With the Center for Disease Control (CDC) announcement Sun., March 15, that large gatherings should be avoided for eight weeks (Major League Baseball then adjusted its earliest possible start of the regular season to mid-May), McCarthy said, "So, what's eight weeks? That's the season right there."

With the meets cancelled so far, "There is no way we're even going to have marks to qualify for Arcadia," a major invitational in the Los Angeles area, said McCarthy.

"I don't think there is going to be school again this spring," he said. "The governor of Ohio has already said that."

"A dream," he said, expressing some hope amidst his discouragement, "would be to have school (resume this school year) with no sports." In other words, McCarthy would like his track athletes to be able to return to competition, but if not, at least classes would resume.