Cordova, Pease, Tarango medal at league meet

The Avocado West League track and field meet took place at El Camino High School and, following the May 10 finals, medals to the top six finishers were presented including those to Fallbrook junior Tervino Cordova and Warrior seniors Gustavo Tarango and James Pease.

Cordova placed second in the 200-meter dash with a time of 22.72 seconds while earning third place in the 100-meter dash with a sprint of 11.40 seconds. “Tervino had a great showing,” said Fallbrook head coach Marco Arias.

The league meet is primarily for CIF qualifying purposes and has no impact on team records. Fallbrook’s 2-5 overall record in dual meets included a 1-4 performance against Avocado West League competition. “We moved into a tougher league this year with some very good talent,” Arias said.

The league meet began with the May 7 preliminaries. “It gave a lot of young guys some experience as far as that type of level of competition,” Arias said.

Those with the top nine times or distances in each event at the preliminaries advanced to the league finals. The top 12 finishers in the 1,600-meter race qualified for the league finals, and there were no preliminaries in the 3,200-meter run or the relay races.

The top two finishers in each event at the league meet qualify for the CIF preliminaries, as do any athletes with times or distances which meet or exceed the CIF standards, and the field is rounded to 27 athletes with the next best marks. Although Cordova automatically qualified in the 200-meter dash, his 100-meter time was neither a standard nor one of the 27 best in the San Diego Section.

The only other Fallbrook boy to qualify automatically for the CIF meet was senior Connor Froboese, whose time of 4:26.62 in the 1,600-meter event was faster than the 4:28 CIF standard even though it was only good for seventh place at the league meet. Junior Elijah Roque also qualified for the 1,600-meter finals, although his 10th-place time of 4:29.18 did not earn him an invitation to the CIF preliminaries.

Fallbrook’s relay teams both earned at-large berths at the CIF meet. The 4x100 squad of freshman DeQuincey Roberson, senior Micah Marroquin, Pease, and Cordova had a fourth-place time of 44.30 seconds at the league meet while the 4x400 quartet of Pease, junior Rene Hernandez, senior Alex Mendoza, and Froboese finished fifth at 3:33.01.

Tarango had a fourth-place time of 16.63 seconds in the 100-meter hurdles and a sixth-place performance of 42.81 seconds in the 300-meter hurdles. Pease finished fourth in the 400-meter race after completing his lap in 52.50 seconds. None of those performances earned lanes in the CIF meet.

Hernandez qualified for the league finals in the 800-meter race. His time of 2:02.44 placed seventh.