Friday's MMC meet

Downey walks into Friday's MMC Championship with perhaps its strongest all-around team in nearly 20 years.

 The F/S girls trail in the race for the championship by a mere one point to Modesto. Their biggest obsticle may be the need to move both Alicia Bargas and Anna Casas up to varsity to compensate for Rory's absence at next week's sub-section meet.

The F/S boys will not field a team. Most likely all the boys will be moved up to varsity for Friday's meet.

The Varsity girls finished third in the MMC last year. They are currently in third; Enochs and Modesto are tied with each other for first. If the girls could win the meet, they potentially could win the league championship. A more likely scenerio is that Modesto wins the meet and the championship and Enochs (who might be missing a key performer) slips, leaving Downey placing second overall. This would be a huge achievement for a team with no seniors.

The varsity boys are in third in the standings. They finished third last year also. They are trailing Modesto (in 1st) and Gregori (in 2nd). It appears that they will finish in third whether they have a good or a bad day.

Beyond team standings, individual titles and all-MMC status is up for grabs. Andrew Osgood has the best chance of the Downey athletes to win a title. He easily won Cluster Meet #1 and finished 2nd in Meet #2.

For All-MMC status, the top 8 finishers will make the first team and the next 7 will be on the second team. Andrew should make the 1st team for the boys. The next best hope for the boys is Guadalupe Torres who was 12th in Cluster #3. A repeat of that performance will land him on the second team. Beyond Guadalupe, Alfonso Urbano is the only other Downey boy to crack the top twenty when he placed 19th in Cluster #2. He would have to have the race of his life to make the top 15.

For the girls Sierra should make the first team as she did last year. She placed in the top 6 in all three of the Cluster meets. Rocio Ramirez Castro placed 8th in the last Cluster Meet, so she still has an outside shot of being on the first team. Rory Jiminez has been in the top 15 in all of the Cluster Meets. She placed as high as 9th in Cluster #2. After finishing 16th in the first meet, Natalie Franco has been in the top 15 in each of the last two meets. All three girls (Rocio, Rory, and Natalie) have an excellant chance of earning all-MMC status. Beyond them, Katie Scheder and Madeleine Souza have placed in the top 20 and have an outside chance of making the second team but it will require an extraordinary effort to reach that goal.