With Arcadia behind them, San Diego Section track and field athletes settle into  three more weeks of dual meets, weekend invitationals, and league trials before Section trials May 20 and finals May 27 at Mt. Carmel, and the state meet in Clovis on June 2-3.

Scripps Ranch’s Alex Barr ran :4:14.51 in the 1600 meters last month in the Mt. Carmel Invitational and holds the state lead. Equally impressive was sophomore Karson Lippert of La Costa Canyon.

Lippert’s :47.83 clocking in the 400 at Arcadia ranks No. 17 all-time in San Diego County and is the best ever for his class. Rashid Shaheed of Mt. Carmel was the San Diego Section leader at :48.47 in 2016.

Leading among the girls is the 2:11.24 800 by La Costa Canyon’s Kiley M cCarthy,  fourth in the state.

San Diego performers in the state top 10, followed by the state leader in those events:

GIRLS

Another good season of San Diego Section basketball is in the books.

St. Augustine finished sixth in the final, expanded Cal-Hi Sports listing of the top 40 teams in the state and the Mission Hills girls were seventh in rankings of the top 35.

The Saints (28-5) were a preseason No. 21 in the newsletter’s top 25  but rolled through local games and showed continued improvement.

An example of the Saints’ rise came in the three losses to No. 2 Mater Dei.  Coach Mike Haupt’s team lost by 23, 12, and finally by 6 to the Monarchs in the Southern California semifinals.

Torrey Pines (28-5) rose to 13^th after not being in the preseason top 25.  Preseason-ignored Vista (28-5) finished 24^th  and Foothills Christian (24-7)  26th after starting No. 16.

Foothills was third in Cal-Hi’s final rankings for the 2015-16 season, with Cathedral 14^th, and St. Augustine 23^rd.

St. Augustine was 23^rd, Torrey Pines 24th, and Foothills Christian 36^th in 2013-14.

Helix, the winningest San Diego team this season with a 31-6 record and a state finalist in Division IV, was not in Cal-Hi’s  top 40.

Schedules matter.  The Highlanders annually do not play the level of opponents of the section’s big three.

HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH…

The girls’ team at Mission Hills repeated its third place rating of a year ago.

The Bishop’s (30-4), with state career scoring leader Destiny Littleton,  was 12^th.

La Jolla Country (18-12) was ranked 26^th, “the best 12-loss team in the state,” according to Cal-Hi Sports, which respects the schedules and teams annually turned out each season by coach Terry Bamford.

TRACK

The spring thinclad season officially commands center stage this week at the Arcadia Invitational, where dozens of San Diego Section runners, throwers, jumpers and vaulters will compete in a variety of classes.

Charles Sanford finished the perfect race.

Etched in my memory: Edwards Stadium, Berkeley, 1963 state track meet, final event, 880-yard relay. San Diego High against the field at the end of the two-day program.

Sanford and teammates Walter (Buddah) Blackledge, Gordon Baker, and Raymond Dixon, were considered one of the better entries coming into the meet with a best time of 1:27.2, but there were other, more favored teams  from the Los Angeles City and Southern sections.

Sanford, who passed away at age 72 recently, was an attacking sprinter, grinding out his races with each stride, and the best at San Diego High since the days of Roscoe Cook and Bobby Staten a decade before.

Sanford had set a San Diego Section record of :09.6 in the 100-yard dash the week before and had a best of :19.2 in the 180-yard low hurdles.

He qualified in neither event in the Friday trials  but was fresh and ready for the baton chase the next day.

The Cavers got off to a good start when Blackledge came out of the blocks with a :22-flat first 220, handing off to Gordon Baker, who put some distance between himself and the pack with a :21.3 second leg.

Baker a sometimes erratic sprinter-quartermiler, ran the most important leg, because he was able to make the second pass from the pole position to Dixon.

With the posse in hot pursuit, Dixon held the inside lane, running his furlong in :21.7, and maintaining Baker’s lead as Dixon passed to  Sanford.

Anchor man Sanford closed with a :21.3 leg, increasing San Diego’s winning advantage  to about five yards.

The Cavers had covered the distance in 1:26.3, second fastest in the country that year; almost one second faster than they had run the week before,  and bettered the record they had shared with the 1957 Cook-Staten-Charles Davis-Willie Jordan team.

Los Angeles Manual Arts was second in 1:26.8.

What I remember most were the flawless handoffs as the Cavers protected the baton amid the pressure of flying spikes, and streaking bodies in a high-powered race.

Sanford, who also was a football standout at San Diego, will be honored in a funeral service Monday, April 3, at 11 a.m. at Missionary Baptist Church in Logan Heights.

Next month, on Feb. 14 [2017], will mark the seventh year since we undertook a challenge.

I wanted to write the history of San Diego County high school football.

That’s where my career started and where it will end.

Well, I didn’t write the history (that is almost infinite), but I gave it a shot.

I attempted to write a narrative about each season. More than 100.

I just counted.

The number includes all seasons from 1914 forward.  I combined the years 1891 to 1913.

Almost all of the narratives are broken into short subjects, vignettes and photographs (pictures mostly from rustic and ragged microfilm at several Southern California sources).

Some years, like 1955, include multiple entries and, starting in 2013, football was covered on a week-to-week basis.

Most seasons usually required an average of about 2,000 words, although there are some with less and many with more.

My superstar writing friend Dave Kindred told me, “It wouldn’t sell and it would be too long,” when I suggested to David that maybe I’d write a book about this parochial subject.

He was right on both counts. But thanks to Henrik Jonson, my cyber guru, we put together a web site:  Partletonsports.com.

Partleton was the name on my father’s birth certificate when he was born in Barbados, “Little England” as it was known.

Dad changed his last name to Smith after he entered the United States following service in the Canadian army in World War I.

I asked him often why he hadn’t been more inventive. He could have changed his name to Jones.

I’m going to continue looking for nuggets of information in football, basketball, track and field, and probably baseball.

It’s a labor of love and in retirement you have to have interests.  I’ve got season tickets to San Diego State basketball and I catch a prep football or basketball game every week.

That and trying to keep Susie happy and watching our 4 grandsons grow up.

There was not a track and field event in which Dick Coxe did not have expertise, but he probably preferred the grueling discipline of cross country.

Friends and former athletes will honor Coxe with their recollections of the demanding, straight-shooting and compassionate mentor in a celebration of his life on Sept. 18 from 1-4 p.m. in the Captain’s Room of Marina Village, 1936 Quivera Way, San Diego, 92109.

Coxe, who recently passed  at age 95, coached 30 years at area high schools Mar Vista, Sweetwater, and Lincoln, and at San Diego Junior College and Mesa College

“He had champions in events ranging from distance, jumps, relays, weights and sprints (as a college volunteer assistant at Hoover in 1952, Coxe even coached pole vaulters),” remembered Mesa distance runner Rich Cota.

“Dick Coxe was organized, structured, and focused,” said Cota.  “He took great pride in having well-rounded dual meet teams. To him, this proved your coaching ability.  Plus, there was a winner and a loser.”

The graduate of Hoover High and San Diego State developed, among dozens of others, 1972 Olympic long jump bronze medalist and 1976 Olympic gold medalist Arnie Robinson at Mesa, where Coxe’s  teams produced 15 state and 4 national community college champions from 1964-65 through 1981-82.

His first-year programs in 1964-65 at the school on Kearny Mesa won the Pacific Southwest Conference and state cross country championships in the fall and the conference track championship the following spring.

“I know I’m biased,” Cota said, “but I believe Coach Coxe thought his greatest accomplishment was winning the state cross-country title in ‘sixty-four, our first year.”

Included among Coxe’s  standouts were Bob Hose, who set an American community college record of 1:48.3 in the 880; Wesley Williams, and James King, who went on to become world-ranked 440-yard intermediate hurdlers.

Williams, who won the state 300 intermediate hurdles championship in 1967,  claimed  the National AAU indoor 600-yard title in 1974 and ’75 and King was the Pan American games winner in 1975.

Williams anchored the state mile relay championship quartet in 1968.  King was leadoff man in 1968 and the first runner on the title-winning 1969 foursome.

Bill Trujillo was a state individual champion in 1964 and

Mesa’s mile relay squad of Bill Millar, Jay Elbel, Wes Williams, and Harold Moore set a national community college indoor record of 3:20.9 in the inaugural 1966 San Diego Indoor Games.

A scholarship in Coxe’s name is being established at Mesa College, c/o Simone Sherrard, 7250 Mesa College Drive, San Diego, 92111.

We’ve been idle since the state high school track meet and probably won’t be posting much for the next month, as our two grandsons, 13 and 12, from Connecticut have made their annual invasion.

For Susie and me, this represents  4-5 weeks of never-ending activity, a veritable jailbreak every day.  It seems like we are training with the SEALs.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

The boys met us in Las Vegas on June 21.  From there came a tour of Hoover Dam, a visit to the magnificent meteor crater near Winslow, Az., and a day at the Grand Canyon.

It’s not all swimming pools and movies.  Some culture is added.

Oh, I’d better not forget.  Happy 48th anniversary today to my beautiful bride.