ELK GROVE — Isaias Hunter and Bikram Thiara are bound for the 98th annual CIF State Track & Field Championships.
Hunter made school history for Lathrop on Friday by becoming the first Spartan to achieve the feat, placing second in the Sac-Joaquin Section Masters high jump with a new personal record of 6 feet, 8 inches. As far Thiara, his exciting third-place finish in the 300-meter hurdles earned him a spot for state.
The top three finishers in each event along with anyone who met or surpassed at-large marks will head to Veterans Memorial Stadium on the campus of Buchanan High in Clovis on June 3-4.
Hunter is elated to be among them.
“It’s a shock,” Hunter said. “I didn’t think I was going to get that high, but it feels great.”
It took a clutch effort for Hunter to punch his ticket to state. He matched his previous best on his final attempt at 6-6. That was enough for him to make his state meet, with only reigning champion Isaiah Holmes of Oakmont and Vista del Lago sophomore Jake Grimsman as the others left standing.
“I though the bar was at 6-7, so I was going at it thinking it was my PR,” Hunter said of his final jump at 6-6. “I took the right steps and bounced right up there. After that it was all momentum.”
Hunter cleared 6-7 — the at-large qualifying standard for state — on his first try, then hit 6-8 on his second at that height. He missed all three of his attempts at 6-9.
Holmes went on to successfully defend his title and tied the section meet record with an astounding leap of 7-1. Grimsman was third at 6-6.
“I definitely wanted to go to state, that was my mindset,” Hunter said. “The whole week in practice we trained hard, I ate the right meals and I came mentally prepared.”
Thiara was scheduled to compete in three events for Masters but scratched the long jump to focus on the hurdles. He first ran the 110 and couldn’t recover after clipping the first few hurdles. Pleasant Grove’s MacLean Conner, the top-seeded finalist, stumbled onto the track while running alongside Thiara, whose sixth-place time of 14.69 seconds was off his wind-aided — and personal record — 14.50 set in Thursday’s preliminaries.
“I actually like that race better, but I just like hurdling and as long as I’m going to state in one of them that’s all that matters,” Thiara said.
He redeemed himself with the race of his life in the 300.
In fifth place after the turn, Thiara passed up Linden’s Josef Polk with about 50 meters left then surged ahead of Kennedy’s Akaash Clayton after the final hurdle to steal the third spot. Thiara cross the finish line in 38.83, a new PR.
“At the beginning I was just running my own race,” Thiara said. “As I came around I saw that I was not far away from third and fourth place. I was like, ‘This could be my last race of the season, so I gotta give it everything I had left in the tank.’
“I just went for it, prayed to God and kept going and going and ended up third in the end. That’s all I was hoping for.”
Four other area individuals also fared well despite not making the cut for state.
Sierra freshman Jesse Hurtado took 12th out of 21 in the mile in 4 minutes, 30.36 seconds. Tomas Huerta of Weston Ranch also ran the 1,600, finishing 14th in 4:31.14
Also from Weston Ranch, Erron Duncan and Andrew Farley nearly made it to the final flights in field events. Duncan was 10th in the long jump with a 21-09, while Farley took 11th in the shot put with a personal record 49-02.50.
In the final event of the night, the Lathrop boys 4x400 relay of Galven Munoz, Tyrell Cooper, Michael Ramos and Tremayne Willis placed seventh in 3:23.87. The quartet, which does not include any seniors, set a school record Thursday in 3:21.50, which seeded it fifth for the finals.