Palisades High was well represented at last Thursday’s City Section track and field championships. The Dolphins had 22 athletes qualify for the final meet at Birmingham High in Lake Balboa and none enjoyed a better day than senior Tuekeha Huntley. Huntley medaled in three events and won the girls’ varsity high jump with a height of 5 feet, two inches–four inches clear of her closest competitor. She also finished fifth in the 300 meter hurdles, right behind teammate Erika Martin, and anchored the girls’ 4 x 400 relay team, which took seventh. “This is the most kids I’ve ever had in the finals, top to bottom,” Palisades Coach Ron Brumel said. “Tuekeha did great [in the high jump] considering she cleared 4-9 at prelims. The fact that she qualified for City finals in four events is impressive enough.” Perhaps no performance all day impressed Brumel more, however, than sophomore Carlos Bustamante’s third-place finish in the boys’ varsity 1600 meters. He put on a late charge to finish in a personal-best 4:26.60, less than four seconds behind winner Pablo Rosales of San Pedro. Bustamante will join Huntley at the state finals this weekend at Cerritos College in Norwalk. “Carlos surprised me the most because he dropped six seconds off his best time and he had to run 4:37 just to qualify ninth,” Brumel said. “In that race I always say you run the first five-eighths with your mind and the last three-eighths with your heart. You want to be in a position to make a move in the last 600 meters and that’s what he did.” Bustamante is Palisades’ first male miler in 12 years to qualify for the state meet. Brumel admitted his team was worn out from the previous week’s City preliminaries so he told Bustamante to ease off on his training leading up to the finals. “On my list he’s one of the top three distance guys I’ve had here,’ Brumel said of Bustamante’high praise indeed considering he once trained former Cal standout Peter Gilmore, now one of the United States’ premiere marathoner runners. “He’s a phenomenal kid with a ton of talent. And he’s only a 10th-grader so he’s only going to get better.” In the boys’ varsity 800 race junior Michael Fujimoto came in seventh in 2:04.29 and Mohaned Elias was unable to finish after getting hit in the stomach with the high jump bar–an incident that upset Brumel. “They called it a freak accident but something like that should never happen,” Brumel said. “The high jump pit was way too close to the track to begin with and some kids were just being careless. It’s unfortunate that it ruined one of my kids’ races. When I saw he had stopped my first thought was that he had a cramp. I didn’t learn what actually happened until later.” Kyle Hale, who had qualified second in the 110 varsity hurdles, finished sixth in the finals in 15.65 seconds and fellow senior Marcus Barrow finished fifth in a jump-off in the long jump with a leap of 20 feet, 11 inches. Ninth-grader Solomon Isreal placed eighth in the boys’ frosh/soph 400 (clocking 55.50 seconds) and Farzan Shirimfar, another freshman, was fourth in a jump-off in the boys’ frosh/soph high jump, clearing five feet, four inches. Sophomore Erika Martin was fourth in the girls’ varsity 300 hurdles and 5th in the 100 hurdles. Junior Camille Liberatore cleared nine feet, six inches and finished second in the girls’ varsity pole vault after a three-way jump-off. Shidera Izuchukwu was sixth in the varsity shot put with a throw of 32 feet, 11 inches. Several frosh/soph girls also turned in notable performances, particularly Mariah Fisher, who won the high jump with a height of four feet, 10 inches, and finished sixth in the 400 meters in 63.58 seconds. Sophomore Michelle Collatto was 13th in the 1600 in 5:51.47 and Karli Feder was 16th in the 3200 in 13:27.73.
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