In looking back over the 2008 season the casual observer would say that it was the best season ever for King Track and Field. They, of course, would be correct in that assessment, especially in light of the list of accomplishments the team amassed.  

-All four teams won the Ivy League Championship for their respective division -
The four teams were a combined 33-3
-Our girls finally defeated North in a gut-wrenching 69-67 upset-paving the way to their first ever Ivy League Championship and ending North’s 12 year run of undefeated League Championships
-Our girls won the Chet Nicholson Relays and our boys finished fifth.
-Our Girls won the Inland Empire Championships beating out 43 other schools
-We qualified 100 kids to league finals-30 kids to CIF Prelims-2 kids to CIF finals and one student athlete made it all the  way to the Master’s meet and to the State meet
-We had four relay teams ranked in the top 20 in the state. 2 of those teams were in the top eight in California and ran  the second and fourth fastest times in Riverside County History.
-Our boys S/F team finished second at the Hemet West Valley Invite
-Manny Santiago became the first male King athlete to qualify for the state track meet. He finished 14^th in the state. -We set a slew of new records and top five marks
-The King Classic has become one of the premier Invites in the CIF-Southern Section  

Contributing to all of this was a group, a rather huge group, of talented King athletes, coaches and boosters whose individual talents and gifts were invaluable in putting the parts into the whole. What is kind of funny is that NONE of these accomplishments were planned nor expected. Yes, it was our best season ever but the reason for it goes beyond the surface of what the casual observer would have seen.  

2008 will be the season where King High Track and Field “grew up.” It was a season where, after years of pushing and prodding by the coaching staff, our kids took at least the first step to the next level. We have always been competitive. We have always been successful. We have always represented ourselves well. However, we weren’t always convinced we belonged at that next level. Our performance at the 2007 CIF prelims was evidence of that. What a debacle it was, as we seemed to cave into the idea that we weren’t good enough to be there or wanted to pay the price it took to get there!! Our performance in the 2008 Arcadia 4X 800 was also evidence of that. Our four girls basically withered under the pressure of Arcadia. The difference from 2007, however, was that very next week, those same girls came back in the Inland Empire Championships and 3 of them placed in the top 6—all in PR times. The difference in 2008 was Manny Santiago’s magical run to the State meet. Here was a guy who no one thought was state material (including his coaches) and for four weeks performed clutch jump after clutch jump, never giving in to the pressure-never believing that he did not belong. The difference in 2008 was watching Sara Strasbaugh charging the final 100 meters at North to pass her opponent and give us a vital third place that, along with some other clutch performances, gave us that slim margin of victory over North. It was Joe Gilleland, with a leg that a lot of people wouldn’t even walk on let alone run on, begging Coach Corona to let him run and then turning in the best split on a mile relay that lost. Ariel Casco couldn’t even make the standard to get on our bus trips at the beginning of the season and she ended up the league champion in the JV 300 hurdles. It used to be our only goal was to be the best at King. Now, a large number of our kids set goals based on competing with the best our league, the Inland Empire, the CIF and even the state have to offer.  

This new attitude is still in its infancy but it has come to our program at the right time as we leave the Ivy League in 2009 and join the newly formed Big VIII conference. North, Poly, and ourselves will join Corona, Norco, Santiago, Roosevelt and Centennial High Schools in a league that promises to be extremely competitive. It will take everything we have to maintain the tradition and the strength of our program against those schools.  It will be a challenge every day.   Normally, we recount the accomplishments of individuals in our summary every year  and certainly the individual accomplishments of Kelsi Tippetts, Carrie Soholt, Tiffany West, Amber Sanford, Chantel Hicks, Katie Coggins, Vivian Ibewrio, Dexter Jackson, Charlie Alvarez, Chris Belfield, Trent Parrish, Brandon Walker, Marques Lea, and Mike Albrecht are among the many stories that could be told in this too small a space. However, their successes are not the major stories of this year. The bigger story isn’t so much what they did but HOW they and their teammates did it and how our program grew because of it. That will be the legacy of 2008. How we maintain that legacy will be up to the Wolf teams to come.