Premier Meets Doubling Up
Can the Los Angeles area support two national-caliber high school track and field meets on the same weekend?
That question has been asked repeatedly by high school track enthusiasts since it was announced that the inaugural California Relays would be held at the Home Depot Center in Carson on April 9-10.
Those are the same dates as the 37th Arcadia Invitational, regarded as the top regular-season meet in the nation. But Terry Kennedy, meet director of the California Relays, said the first-year meet is not trying to compete with Arcadia.
“These were the only days we could get the venue this year,” said Kennedy, who is also the coach of the powerful Long Beach Wilson girls’ program. “I’ve already spoken with Doug Speck, one of the main organizers of the Arcadia Invitational, about talking about holding the meets on different weekends next year.”
The Arcadia Invitational will be missing talented athletes from schools such as Wilson, Los Angeles Dorsey and Compton Dominguez -- because those teams will be competing in the California Relays -- but meet director Rich Gonzalez said Arcadia was still shaping up as one of the best ever.
“It mainly was an issue about money,” Dominguez Coach Darryl Smith said. “We paid $67 per relay team to run in the [night portion of the] Arcadia Invitational last year. That was just too much money to spend for a program that doesn’t have a lot of money to begin with.”
Smith, the track coach at Dominguez since 1985, said many coaches thought the entry fees for Arcadia had become too expensive in recent years. But Gonzalez said there would be a $250 entry-fee cap -- meaning no school will pay more than $250 in entry fees -- for Arcadia this year.
The price is the same as the California Relays and half of what it was two years ago.
Duane Norris, a coach at Pasadena La Salle, said he liked the idea of the California Relays because it will give teams from smaller schools a chance to compete in a big meet at a facility that will play host to the second edition of the world-class Home Depot Invitational on May 22.
“It was getting harder and harder to gain entry into Arcadia,” Norris said. “It was almost getting to where we were down to begging for a lane in a race. From our standpoint, because there are no other relay meets big enough the weekend of Arcadia, it effectively became a lost weekend.”
Meet organizers of the California Relays have guaranteed that any relay team that enters the meet will be allowed to compete.
Kennedy said last week that about 75 schools -- including teams from New York, Florida and Nevada -- had entered athletes in the California Relays and he expected more to do so before the entry deadline of Tuesday.
He rattled off a list of prominent local performers, such as defending state sprint champions Lionel Larry of Dominguez and David Gettis of Dorsey, who were scheduled to compete in the meet. And he recited an equally long list of performers from outside Southern California.
But two of the athletes he mentioned, distance runner Mark Matusak of Los Angeles Loyola and sprinter Kenny O’Neal of Oakland Skyline, are expected to run at Arcadia.
Not that Smith, the Dominguez coach, is worried.
“It’s going to be hard to have as many big-name athletes as Arcadia,” he said.
“I’m going to take a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to who’s coming from outside the area. But I do think a lot of good local kids are going to run at the meet.”