Senior’s 800 at Sacramento Raises Question About Record

The 800-meter time of 1 minute 50.25 seconds run by Mt. Miguel High School’s Mark Senior on Saturday in the Golden West Invitational in Sacramento was fast enough to set a San Diego Section record. Whether it will be remains a question.

The existing section record of 1:51.1 was set by Bob Hose of Madison in 1964. It is the county’s oldest remaining record.

Two weeks after the state meet that year, Hose ran a 1:49.2 in an open pre-Olympic meet at Balboa Stadium. Jim Ryun of Wichita (Kan.) East was the only other high school runner in the meet, and Senior’s time has never been recognized as the section mark.

The Golden West meet took place a week after the state meet (June 3 and 4), and all the competitors were from high schools. Senior, the state 800 champion, finished third.

Section commissioner Kendall Webb said he wasn’t sure whether Senior’s time would qualify as a section record. Webb said he had not faced a situation in which a county athlete had run a record-caliber time after the conclusion of the high school season in a race involving only high school athletes.

“We’ve never established a policy about this thing,” Webb said. “Now that it has come up, we’ll have to.”

But Webb said there was no urgency to make a decision.

“The mark will be there,” he said. “We are just going to have to establish a policy to frame it.”

Thomas Byrnes, the California Interscholastic Federation commissioner, said there are no state criteria for the individual sections to follow and that each is on its own in determining records.