RUNNING / JOHN ORTEGA : Without Input on State Meet Ruling, Coaches, Athletes Hung Out to Dry

The cancellation of the state state high school track and field championships at Cerritos College because of an unseasonal rainstorm over the weekend did little to improve California’s reputation as a haven for lightweight flakes.

Tom Byrnes, the state commissioner, made the final decision to cancel the meet.

The decision was not only wrong, according to every athlete and coach The Times has interviewed since Saturday, but it was doubly insulting because they had no say in the matter.

The five-member track advisory committee that recommended the cancellation consisted of Dean Crowley, Hal Harkness, Larry Arason, Bob McGuire and Bryan Leighliter.

Crowley, the meet manager, is the associate commissioner of the Southern Section and Harkness is the City Section commissioner. Arason, the meet referee, is the state rules interpreter for cross-country and track, and McGuire, the assistant meet manager, is a teacher and former coach at La Mirada High. Leighliter is the track maintenance manager at Cerritos College.

“My biggest complaint is that the coaches and athletes were never involved in the decision-making process,” Camarillo boys’ Coach Dennis Riedmiller said. “They never asked us what we thought, and they didn’t even have the guts to tell us about it after they had made the decision. They just had a few notices posted and a few of their lackeys handing them out.”

Agoura Coach Bill Duley voiced similar sentiments, saying that the California Coaches Alliance, an organization of the state’s high school cross-country and track coaches, should “demand that it have more say in these types of decisions.”

If California coaches are looking for a model, they might want to look east. In New York state, two 14-member committees oversee the boys’ and girls’ state championship meets. All but one member of each committee is a current high school coach.

Such a setup in California probably would have prevented Saturday’s fiasco, which marked the only time other than World War II (1942-45) that the state meet has been canceled since it began in 1915.

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Add state meet: Cerritos College no longer will serve as the site of the state meet if coaches from Northern California get their way. They asserted that Saturday’s cancellation would not have occurred had the meet been scheduled in the central or northern part of the state.

“I heard a few coaches say, ‘See, this is what happens when we let the Southern Section run the meet every year,’ ” Thousand Oaks girls’ Coach Art Green said. “I didn’t like them putting the blame for what happened on the entire section, since our coaches and athletes wanted to compete as much as theirs, but I could understand their frustration.”

The state meet has been run at Cerritos College every year since 1988.

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Leading shockers: If there were an award for the most shocking performances of the season among area high school track and field athletes, Jeff Nadeau of Monroe High and Vanitta Kinard of El Camino Real would be this year’s winners.

Nadeau, headed to Arizona on a football scholarship, raised his personal best by 6 1/4 inches when he cleared a City Section record of 7 feet 2 1/4 inches to win the Valley Pac-8 Conference championship at Birmingham High last month. The 6-foot-1, 170-pound Nadeau cleared the height on his 24th attempt of the competition.

Kinard bounded a wind-aided 36-10 to win the girls’ triple jump in the City Section championships two weeks ago, but that did not prepare anyone for her wind-aided bomb of 40-2 3/4 to lead all qualifiers in the preliminary round of the state meet.

Kinard’s sudden improvement makes her an NCAA Division I talent, but she is academically ineligible to compete at that level and will attend Santa Monica College in the fall.

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Honor role: Marion Jones of Thousand Oaks and Cheaza Figueroa of Quartz Hill are two of four athletes who qualified for the finals of the state track championships in three individual events.

Jones, the three-time defending state champion in the girls’ 100 and 200 meters, qualified in those two events and in the long jump.

Figueroa, who placed fourth in the girls’ long jump in last year’s state meet, qualified in that event and in the 100-meter high hurdles and triple jump.

Edward Turner (boys’ 100, 200, long jump) of Inglewood Morningside and Bisa Grant of Oakland Bishop O’Dowd (girls’ 100, 200 and 100 hurdles) were the other triple qualifiers.

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Track shorts: Peter De La Cerda of Adams State (Colo.) won his second national title when he placed first two weeks ago in the NCAA Division II track championships at Abilene Christian. He timed 30:06.71 over 10,000 meters.

De La Cerda, a 1989 graduate of Granada Hills High, won the 5,000 in the Division II indoor championships in March. . . .

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo received second-place finishes from Jerry Edwards (Westlake ‘88) in the decathlon and Julie Tingle (Agoura ‘89) in the heptathlon at the Division II meet.

Edwards, who competed for Moorpark before San Luis Obispo, placed second in the decathlon with 7,005 points, and Tingle tied for second in the heptathlon with 5,151 points.

Erick McBride (Palmdale ‘89) of Cal State Bakersfield finished third in the men’s 800 (1:49.03) in the Division II meet.

McBride, who set a Cal State Northridge record of 1:49.09 in 1990 before transferring to Bakersfield, was shooting for his third consecutive Division II title in that event.