2026 Pcal MAsters meet

It is our time shine: we are ready for a seat at the table 

This team is built different. Yes, I know that is a cliché. I just don't have a better way of explaining it. Our athletes relish the shot to compete, regardless of what the outcome may be. No race is too fast, or competition too fierce. As proof of such, I present to you our Boys 4x100 relay. Normally, when a team loses two legs of a relay, the procedure is to scratch the event. Why race? There is no point in tiring out the athletes for their other events. Nope, not for the Breakers. No opportunity to compete will ever be thrown away like that.

Stepping up to run was a team composed of sprinters, jumpers, and a distance runner! And yes, the time was what you should expect from a team with two days of practice. But that is not my point. The point is that Breakers run because they love this sport; just being able to wear the red and gold and run for their school is victory enough. The team of Freshman Louie Pereyo, Junior Lachlan Whitson, Junior Kabir Sharma, and Freshman Gabe Alt, proved without a shadow of a doubt that while the big schools might have the numbers, they don’t have a monopoly on competitive spirit or grit. This is exactly what it means to represent the “Culture of We.” Stepping up to fill the holes so others have the opportunity to compete. Simply selfless. 

The night was still young, and many more events were left to seize. With a sore shoulder taped up, Junior shot putter Molly Selfridge battled through pain and a slippery ring to secure 6th place, moving on to CCS. At the high jump pit, Senior Trenton Maciel continued his 1st place streak and punched his ticket for CCS. In the horizontal jumps, Sophomore Silas Schulz waited until his last jump to take the top mark in the triple jump. Joining him at CCS in the triple will be the ever-versatile Junior Sergen Serttunc. Both jumpers also qualified in the long jump as well.

From the sand, we move to the track, where I must point out the absurdity of the boys' 800m race. When I mentioned earlier about only getting one shot, I can think of no other race that exemplifies it more than this one. Of the 16 athletes that ran those two laps, twelve of them PR’d. Twelve! Even crazier was that the top nine runners all PR’d. Think of how rare that is, each athlete pushing the other to achieve something they had never achieved before. To move on, you had to be faster than you have ever been in your life. Our own Junior, Betinho Zunguze, was among those top nine. Breaking the two-minute barrier, he bettered his best time by three seconds to come in 5th with a 1:58.18.

If that wasn’t enough, just two events later, Betinho joined Seniors Antony Gabrik and Tadeo Ortiz, and Freshman Gabe Alt, to take down the 4x800 relay record by four-tenths of a second. They moved from 7th place all the way to 2nd over the four legs or the race. The real kicker? Gabe’s older brother, Jake Alt, was on the 2019 relay team they just surpassed.

The Girls 4x800, not to be outdone by the boys, had their own magic moment. Down two legs from injury and illness, Freshman Eleanor Holt, Lucia Troy, Ellie Nuckles, and Senior Sulu Gurung ran their hearts out, finishing 5th, one spot in front of Carmel, advancing to CCS and rewriting the record books by more than 30 seconds.

The same Eleanor that helped secure a school record in the 4x800 wasn’t quite done. Just 15 minutes and 1 event later, she took to the track again in the 3200m as one of only two freshmen in the race. On what I can only describe as lactate-laden legs, Eleanor dropped 11 seconds off her PR and added her name to the record boards as the 5th fastest underclassman in school history.

Three school records in one meet is absolutely crazy, so for what I write now, I have literally run out of adjectives. Our very own Antony Gabrik, in the last Masters meet of his high school career, ran a masterful 1600m race. A race, like the 800, littered with PRs (nine to be exact). Antony, with a PR of his own, took 2nd overall, cementing his legacy as the third fastest in school history over that distance.

To recap: in the span of one evening, at the highest level of competition in our league, we had six individuals and two relay teams qualify for CCS (the most in the last 20 years) and set four new school records.

So, I’ll ask again: why doesn't track get that "Big Three" shine? Maybe it’s because our sport is too honest. In the other sports, you can hide. You can blend into a system, or pray the ball doesn't come your way when the game is on the line. But on the track, there is nowhere to hide. There are no lucky bounces, no subjective whistles, and no bench to retreat to. It is just you, the lane, and a clock that never lies.

While the world waits four years to care about a finish line, we get to see it every week. We see the "Culture of We" in a distance runner stepping up to sprint a relay leg just so his teammates can compete. We see it in the "lactate-laden legs" of a freshman running two elite races in fifteen minutes. Or when you have one last jump left, and you fall back on your training and prove that you put in the work by beating everyone. That isn't just "athleticism"...that’s grit that would make any Friday night football star take notice.

The lights might be brighter on the hardwood or the diamond, but they don't shine any truer than they do on the oval. We don't need a Shoe game or a walk-off homer to tell us we’ve arrived. The records are broken, the tickets to CCS are punched, and the results speak for themselves.

All I really have left to say is… get us our chair!

Full results can be found here