Amidst a program rebuild, Summerville finds early success
The Summerville girls track and field team is small this year. So small that, by missing one of their sprinters Saturday, the varsity team was down a sixth of their total strength.
That didn’t stop the Bears’ small, but mighty team from taking sixth place in a field of 13 teams at the Calaveras Invitational. Among the teams they defeated were Denair, Escalon, Central Valley and Linden.
The key to their outsized success? Star power.
Led by the multi-event trio of Arianna Martinez, Miranda Bendix and Jordan Bick, the Bears were able to rack up a number of top finishes across the distance events, throws and sprints to finish with big points.
While the Bears have long known they can rely on the scoring of juniors Martinez and Bendix, the addition of Bick, only a freshman, has given the team the firepower across the sprint events to compete with bigger Mother Lode League programs.
The freshman has been thrown in the deep end, being relied upon to score big points for the Bears, but said she is taking it all in stride.
“Definitely that you kind of have to work through it,” Bick said. “I kind of feel like I have a head start, being a freshman on varsity, and I am going to work towards being faster than them. It is kind of really scary standing over there, because they are talking about what colleges they committed to, and I just committed to high school.”
Bick finished sixth place in the 100-meter race in a personal-best time of 13.45, but it was in the 200 meters she did the most damage. The freshman finished just behind Central Valley sprint star Kalli Hoffman — the meet’s 100-meter champion — in another personal-best of 27.68.
Senior Sarah Acevedo, a transplant from Bears’ talented girls soccer program, has also excelled this season. Acevedo scored in three of her four events — including high jump, the 400-meter dash and the 800-meter run — for 11 points on the day.
With a fourth-place finish Saturday, the Summerville boys took a victory over every single MLL team — including last year’s league champion Bret Harte Bullfrogs — apart from cross-town rival Sonora.
The Bears found big success on the track, racking up 22 points in the sprints and hurdles while scoring 30 points across three distance events.
The performance was a great sign of improvement for a Bears team which finished a lowly fifth place at the MLL championships last season. According to new Bears head coach Jeremy Macdonald, the biggest change in this year’s group is the success of its new athletes.
“I have a lot of kids who haven’t done track before and so this is a lot of their first meets,” Macdonald said. “Jordan is a freshman, she ran well in the 100, expects to do well in the 200. Auston Hike gets fourth in the 100 and he has not ever done track before, so our newcomers are young guys that have come in and embraced the challenges we have been faced with and have done pretty well today.”
Senior distance runner Cruz Vasquez dominated the 1600-meter race, leading wire-to-wire and winning by over 50 seconds in a personal-best time of 4:33.46. Alongside Martinez on the girls side — who was runner-up in the 1600 meters and took a big win in the 3200 meters — the distance-running pair scored big.
For Macdonald, leadership from the older distance stars provides motivation for their young teammates across a number of events.
“I think it’s huge. At big meets like this, (if) you win a couple of events, you dink and dunk at some fourth- and fifth-place finishes and you are in the mix. That experience that those guys bring is huge for our young team, especially, because they can kind of set the example of where we want to be and then those other kids have something to kind of strive for.”
Teammates Chris Carr (5:23.83), Altin Hendricks (5:27.26) and Jackson Moses (5:32.99) added 6 more points with sixth-, seventh- and eighthplace finishes, respectively. That trio added nine more points with fifth-, sixth- and seventh- place finishes in the 3200-meter race as well.
Macdonald is in his first year coaching at Summerville, after a 22-year career at neighboring Sonora. The team has modest goals for the season, but with how they have opened things up, the sky may be the limit for this Bears group.
“I knew Summerville needed some help last year, they were really thin with their coaching staff so I volunteered for a change of scenery and a change of pace,” Macdonald said. “My goals were to get coaches and to do my best to get depth and get as many kids out for track and field as possible … that’s really where we are at with our program is really just trying to almost start from scratch.”