La Mirada High School

The boys and girls of the Matadores Varsity and JV teams took to the hills of the La Mirada Regional Park's San Gabriel Valley League course on Thursday for the Suburban League's final cluster meet of 2005. Prior to the race, the Girls Varsity and JV teams held on to first place while the Boys Varsity and JV teams entered League finals in 4th and 5th place place respectively.

The Girl's Varsity team of Stephanie Felix, Karina Gonzalez, Adele Mata, Destinie Martin, Sarah Jeon, Jenna Pasillas, and Clarissa Negrete earned the top spot in the Suburban League at the 2005 League Finals race. This marks the 5th consecutive year the girl's team has gone undefeated in league and the 20th consecutive season the Lady Mats qualify for CIF-SS Prelims. The girls own a record of 111 wins against only 5 losses over the last 10 seasons and have earned the Suburban League crown for 9 out of the past 11 years. And even though they had a comfortable lead throughout the race, the margin was closer at this race than at the previous two league cluster meets.

Stephanie took off and cruised to an opening mile of 5:53. She was unchallenged throughout the race and completed the 3-mile race in a course record 17:51. Destinie and Karina stayed with the second pack and fell off pace with a relatively slow opening mile of 6:30. Karina and Adele took off at that point and moved up to the 4th spot and 8th spot where they would both finish. Destinie was right behind in 9th place.

Sarah and Jenna worked their way into the top 15 and allowed the girls to place 6 runners among the top 15 in league. Clarissa rounded out the girl's team. Besides Stephanie's course record, the Lady Mats established a team time record (99:24) for La Mirada teams running at La Mirada Regional Park.

The big news of the day for the Lady Mats was the effort of Sophomore, Erica Campos in the JV Girls race. Erica pushed the pace and challenged for the top spot throughout the race; she completed the course in a PR of 21:58. For her efforts, Erica was the top JV runner of the day, the 7th overall runner for the girls and will join the varsity team on their trip to CIF. Tasha LeBrija and Andrea Smith finished right behind Erica in 3rd and 4th place respectively. The JV Girls fell a few points short of 1st place and settled for another 2nd place finish. Krystal Gomez and Andrea Smith will join the varsity team at CIF.

On the boys side, Andrew Diaz fell short of his quest for the top spot in league but will advance to the CIF-SS prelims with the entire boys team. Andrew Bueno had a fine race, and completed the course in 16:52. Dennis Ly, Matthew Campbell, Daniel Diaz, Michael Palmer and Jason Kim made up the 2005 varsity team.

Besides determining the 2005 League Champs, the final cluster meet of the season also determined who advanced to CIF-SS competition. Under this year's Southern Section guidelines, in a 7 or 8 member league, 4 teams advance to the playoff round. Both the boys and the girls earned a spot in the CIF-SS prelims race to be held Saturday, November 12th at Mt. SAC.