Coast Conference Championships - October 28, 2009

Heading into the 2009 Coast Conference championship meet, the men's cross country team was a heavy underdog and would need a bit of luck to bring home a title to Salinas.The team would be running with an injured Manuel Esparza, one of the top individuals in Norcal, in hopes the sophomore could catch a break and manage to place high enough for the team to take the title.

Cross country is a team scoring sport with a team's first five placing runners determining the outcome. Hartnell learned how important this fact is in the men's race. Just three weeks ago before a devastating case of shin splints, Manuel Esparza produced one of the school's best individual marks at Crystal Springs with a time of 22:24. Had Esparza been able to reproduce that mark yesterday the Panthers would have taken home the team title. The debilitating shin splints forced the sophomore to stop running all together and go strictly to a regimen of cross training and injury rehabilitation for three leading into the race. As a result, Esparza did make an attempt to run but was unable to finish the race.

Daniel Tapia, the top runner in the state, held back early in attempt to help sophomore Jesus Cabrera potentially improve his individual placing. With a move at three miles, Tapia took control of the race and sped his way to his second Coast Conference title in 21:28 for the challenging 4.195 mile course. Cabrera, who was as far back as seventh with 1000 meters to go, would put in a charge to move up and held third place as late as 50 meters from the finish. The sophomore could not hold off two hard charging athletes from City College of San Francisco and placed fifth overall in a new personal best 21:57. Freshman Rigo Vasquez, who at one time was in the lead of the race, placed sixth (22:07) with teammate Alejandro Alcaraz (22:29) in eighth. Following Alcaraz it was apparent how painful Esparza's inability to run was as Hartnell would have to wait til Eric Yepez (24:05) would cross the line in 26th to finish the team scoring. Depsite Yepez's personal best by two minutes, the 15 individual placings between he and CCSF's fifth man was all the difference fo the title. Hartnell had placed four runners in front of team winner City College of San Francisco had their fourth runner in but CCSF would finish their team score with a runner at tenth overall. Despite the bittersweet rewards of having four runners get All-Conference and every placing runner set a personal best for the course could not offset the sting of knowing what could have been with a healthy Manuel Esparza.

Currently ranked fifth in Norcal, the Hartnell men will look to improve on that ranking on Novemer 7th at the regional championships. Sophomore Daniel Tapia will look to become the school's first ever repeat Norcal individual champion.