It has been 51 years since Janice Wiser, a student at La Jolla High who worked in the front office while still going to school, suddenly "became" the girls track team at LJHS and nearly won the state title in Spring 1974.
Wiser, who continues to live in San Diego and has been married all these years since, decided to run for the Vikings--when they didn't yet have an actual girls track squad--and won both the 100- and 200-yard dashes at the CIF state meet.
She could have won the state team championship for La Jolla High if she had run the quarter-mile the next day. But she declined, and the rest is history.
"Janice ran the 100 and 220 just to work out," said her husband, Robert Pope, contacted Thurs., June 26. "The race she was really good at was the 400."
Her workouts and competing were all for her AAU team, until the invitation to run for her school came up.
Janice Wiser is the reason CIF made a rule that a track and field athlete has to compete in a minimum number of meets for their school during the regular season, to qualify for postseason competition.
The fact Wiser could step in and instantly win those races at that high a level of competition, at the end of the Spring season, shows how dominant she was in her sport.
Back then, clocked times were hand-held. Times were not electronically tracked. That preceded the "modern era" when, even at the high school level, those things are taken for granted.
You had dirt tracks, not an all-weather surface. The shoes were "crummy" compared to the high-tech "kicks" athletes wear now.
Robert, her husband, was not a track athlete. "I was at UCSD" when he met his future wife. "She was 17. I was 18."
Pope graduated from Thomas Jefferson High in L.A. He was a baseball player. A trio of athletes came out of his alma mater to play in the pros: David and Michael Edwards, one of whom played for the Padres, and another baseball player.
Robert graduated from high school in the class of 1972. Janice graduated in 1974.
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