Fast Track to Success : Hart’s Medearis Became One of State’s Top Hurdlers After He Quit Other Sports

He considered himself a football, basketball and baseball player as a freshman, yet Jason Medearis will conclude his high school career as one of the nation’s top hurdlers when he runs in the Golden West Invitational at American River College in Sacramento today.

The Hart High senior placed second in the 300-meter intermediate hurdles and fourth in the 110 highs in last week’s state championships, and is eligible to compete in the National Scholastic Outdoor championships and the USA Track & Field Junior (age 19 and under) meet later this month.

The Golden West, however, will be his final high school meet.

“This is the last time I’m going to run these races at the high school level so I’m going to be pretty fired up,” he said. “I’m going to run all out and just start pumping my arms as hard as I can when I hit the straightaway.”

Medearis will go through graduation ceremonies June 21, but has no plans for the summer besides hanging out with his friends and cruising in his “pride and joy,” a 1969 Mustang hard-top.

That’s quite a difference from the past three summers when Medearis’ schedule included several passing leagues in preparation for football in the fall.

Accepting a track scholarship to Wyoming has put football in Medearis’ past.

The three-year varsity letterman expects to experience some withdrawal pangs in the fall, but he’s confident he did the right thing by choosing track.

At 6 feet, 175 pounds, Medearis needed to bulk up to play defensive back or wide receiver at the NCAA Division I level and the excess weight would have bogged him down on the track.

Running the hurdles also puts less stress on his body than playing football. And he knows about stress.

Last June, Medearis suffered a stress fracture in his left foot when he tried to cut upfield during the L.A. Watts Summer Games passing league competition.

Then he sustained a dislocated left shoulder in the second game of the season last fall.

Although the shoulder injury--which ended his season--was the more painful of the two, the stress fracture took a bigger emotional toll because it knocked him out of the final of the state track championships.

“I realize now that I shouldn’t have been playing football at that time,” Medearis said earlier this season. “It wasn’t worth it.”

Medearis injury would have come after the state meet if not for an unusual decision by the California Interscholastic Federation to cancel the finals because the all-weather track at Cerritos College was unsafe for competition after a rainstorm.

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The state finals were canceled June 5, but the CIF rescheduled the event for June 19 after an avalanche of criticism. Medearis injured his foot June 13.

His absence was particularly disheartening because he performed so well in the preliminaries.

He posted the top mark--a wind-aided 14.11 seconds--in the highs and the fourth-best time (38.38) in the intermediates.

He surprised himself with his time in the highs and proved he could “run with the big boys.”

That confidence carried over to his senior season. Medearis opened with an impressive victory in his heat of the 50-meter highs in the Sunkist Invitational in the Sports Arena in February.

He eventually lowered his personal bests from 14.49 to 14.12 in the highs and from 38.02 to 36.80 in the intermediates.

The time in the intermediates moved Medearis to third on the yearly national list and to second on the all-time region list behind Charles White, who ran 36.4 in the 330-yard intermediates in 1976 for San Fernando High.

Using terms such as personal bests was foreign to Medearis four years ago.

But that was before he took up track at the urging of his mother, Sally, who wanted to see how he would fare in an individual sport after he played freshman football and basketball but failed to make the freshman baseball team.

His mother encouraged him to become a sprinter, but he decided to take up the hurdles because he wanted “something a lot more challenging and I knew I didn’t have blazing speed.”

It was a wise decision.

Medearis ran “around 16 seconds” in his first frosh-soph high hurdles race and from then on, he was a member of the varsity, winning the first of four consecutive league high hurdles titles as a freshman.

He competed in football, basketball and track as a sophomore, but dropped basketball to get a head start on track as a junior.

The move led to a breakthrough season as Medearis placed second in the intermediates and third in the highs in the Southern Section Division I championships, leading Hart to a second-place finish behind Muir.

“I was always thinking about getting a football scholarship,” Medearis admitted. “But then I realized that my times in track were making me pretty appealing in that sport.”

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Nonetheless, after catching 24 passes for 491 yards and five touchdowns as a junior, Medearis regarded football as his No. 1 sport entering his senior season.

But when football recruiters stopped calling him after his shoulder injury, he began to contemplate a track career in college.

He will focus on the 400-meter intermediate hurdles, an event that tests speed and stamina by requiring a hurdler to clear 10 three-foot-high hurdles during the race.

Medearis will still compete in the 110 highs, but his future lies in the intermediates.

“I’m going to have to hit the weights a little more and get my (quadriceps) stronger because they’re pretty tiny right now,” Medearis said.

“But the 400s are going to be my race.”

Spoken like an athlete committed to the hurdles.