County’s Cross-Country Championships Canceled

The 31st running of the Orange County Cross-Country Championships, scheduled for today at Irvine Regional Park, has been canceled, meet manager Jerry Whitaker said Friday.

Irvine Park, site of the annual event, has been closed to the public as fire crews have used it as their base to fight recent fires in the eastern Orange County foothills.

“It’s unlikely that the meet will be run this year,” Whitaker said. “This is breaking a long tradition.”

There is a grass-roots campaign being made, however, by Mission Viejo Coach Gene Gurule and El Toro Coach Rick Hagin to have the meet run next week.

“If everyone is agreeable and the park is available, we will run the meet on Tuesday,” Gurule said.

“Rick and I really want to run this race because we have two of the top county runners in Mark Gleason [Mission Viejo] and Danny Lee [El Toro] and there are some outstanding teams out there, and they all want to be county champions.”

Said Hagin: “I just wish we had an alternate site. I hope we can do it on Tuesday, but we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Lee, a senior who runs for the seventh-ranked Chargers, was looking forward to running in this year’s meet.

“It’s my senior year and I really wanted to run this race and I really wanted to run against Gleason,” he said. “It’s a big disappointment.”

Gleason won the boys’ individual championship last year as a junior.