Coming off of their first meet of the season, Orestimba High School’s track and field team ended up with two first-place finishes in the Stanislaus County Championships at Hughson High School last Friday.
Junior Marian Quevedo and sophomore Imelda Beltran, who both won an event at the 6th Annual Tigerbuster Invite the week before, finished at the top of the leaderboards in the girls’ 100-meter hurdles and 400-meter dash, respectively. Quevedo ran a time of 17.62 seconds in the 100 hurdles, making this the second-fastest time for the event in the program’s history. This time is only .10 seconds behind the fastest time that Quevedo set at the previous meet.
Beltran, who continues to carry her momentum from last season, concluded the 400 meter with a time of 1 minute, 1.62 seconds. Her time was the program’s second-fastest time in the event, with the fastest set at 1.01.15, which she set at last season’s County Clash meet.
Head Coach Charles Kothenbeutel praised the two athletes’ performance and their approach of not focusing on other athletes' times.
“Oftentimes, people get caught up in what other people’s times are,” Kothenbeutel said. “I think they’ve (Quevedo and Beltran) done a pretty good job on focusing on themselves and what they need to do to get better. And they’ve got their own personal goals that they want to reach, and it’s been nice seeing them kind of work towards those, as opposed to worrying about any of outside stuff.”
As a team, Orestimba’s girls finished in fifth place and the boys ended 14th overall. Turlock High School dominated the meet, where both the boys' and girls' teams finished in first place with a point differential of at least 64 points ahead of second place.
While it’s not the result the program wanted, Kothenbeutel’s biggest takeaway from the meet was how the team competed throughout the various events, especially with some of the athletes being freshmen.
“We’ve got a lot of potential, but our guys, it’s a lot of new faces, lots of youth, where the girls are veterans, and they came out and showed out,” Kothenbeutel said. “In our county, we got a lot of Division I schools and they (girls) finished fifth overall.”
Despite having two first-place finishes, the Warriors finished within the top five in multiple events while setting program records.
The girls' relay team that consisted of Quevedo, Beltran, junior Mariah Moreno and senior Olivia Gray concluded a highly contested 4x400 meter-relay event with a time of 4:26.80 for second place behind first place Pitman High School.
Quevedo also had a strong outing in the girls’ 300-meter hurdles, where she ended up in third place behind Pitman’s Nayeli Mattison and Turlock’s Zoe Lamur. She set a personal record time of 49.30 seconds in the event and once again cemented herself in the program’s record books with this being the fastest time for the 300 hurdles.
Senior Jordan Mello ended up in third place in the girls' triple jump with a recorded jump of 9.86 meters, finishing behind Enochs High School's Rylie Bethke and Riverbank High School’s Maya Guzman.
Senior Patricio Kearney finished in fifth place in the boys’ 1600-meters dash with a personal record time of 4:30.27, becoming the second-fastest time in program history behind Dillion Mart, who set a time of 4:26.46 for the event at the West Valley/Chico Invitational in 2011.
The team will travel to Manteca High School for the Carl Chandler V Invitational on Saturday. The invitational will begin at 9 a.m.
Navtej Hundal is a freelance journalist in Stanislaus County.
