PCL cross country meets begin Saturday at one location with staggered starts

Coaches and administrators at schools in the Pacific Coast League teamed up to develop a plan for girls and boys high school cross country meets at all levels beginning Saturday, Feb. 6 with all competition at one location and staggered starting times.

No spectators will be allowed due to health guidelines related to the coronavius pandemic. Beckman High will be the site of Saturday’s first PCL meets starting at 7 a.m. Beckman will meet University, followed by the Northwood-Irvine meet and Portola-Woodbridge contest. Meets will be held on school campuses

Laguna Hills, a new member to the league, will have a bye this week. Laguna Hills will host the meets on Saturday, Feb. 13 and will face Beckman. Northwood will face Woodbridge and University will meet Irvine in the other two meets next week.

While Orange County is in the most restrictive purple tier, cross country is allowed. Beckman hosted a nonleague meet Saturday against Foothill to open the season.

“We will run our meets on Saturdays, athletes will be socially distanced and wearing a mask and always having that mask with them,” said Mark Cunningham, Irvine Unified School District Athletic Director.

While rules from the California Department of Public Health do not require athletes to wear masks during the actual races, Cunningham said he is encouraging runners to do so.

A number of other safety precautions will be taken.

“The races will be spaced out to minimize the number of athletes participating,” Cunningham said. “We will have separate starting and finishing lines to reduce close contacts at the beginning and ending of the races. 

“Because of the spacing of the races the different levels will not be in the areas at the same time.  We will run varsity girls, then (varsity) boys, then JV girls, then boys and finally FS girls and then boys. 

“They will run at different times a minimum of 30 minutes apart.  The athletic directors and coaches have developed a program to ensure safety first of our athletes. We are so grateful that we can get our cross-country teams competing.”

Portola Athletic Director Peter Abe said many people teamed up to make the meets a reality.

“It was a great collaborative effort to get all the schools on board,” said Abe, who is also Portola’s football coach. “The cross country coaches worked so well collaboratively together to make this work, they had so many different ideas. The ADS were all supportive and threw in their ideas and the principals were all involved with their ideas. I think everyone is just excited to get the kids back out there and give them an opportunity to compete.

“Our district has been so great, Mark Cunningham, the district AD and our director of secondary education have all been great in communicating our needs along with the coaches needs to the school board and superintendent. Everybody has been doing everything they possibly can to get the kids out there as soon as they possibly can and as safe as they possibly can.”

Abe said the format should work out well.

“Each race has the ability to be run and be finished and done and then (athletes) leave, and then the next group comes in, so there will be a like a warm-up holding area for one group and then one group is going to be completely done and leave and then the other group will come on,” he said.

Abe said he realizes that fans may want to watch the competition from a distance.

“It’s supposed to be no spectators, obviously the campuses will be closed, we’re not going to have people wondering the campus that don’t belong there,” he said. “But who knows what people would go to to watch competition nowadays. We just aren’t going to be allowing them on campus. But if you’re standing across the street, there’s not a whole lot we can do about that.

“We’re keeping them (the meets) all pretty much on campus so we don’t have to do a ton of permits and closures of streets. I think it’s going to be a pretty cool vibe at each dual meet. I like the format.”

There will be six meets with the final one scheduled for Saturday, March 13.

-Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com