Camarillo High School

This photo is facing east. This new blue surface was just installed in late 2002. This is very close to my office, but I don't pass here everyday. This is important because I have had the opportunity to watch this resurfacing. I spent weeks of phone call chasing trying to find out when they were going to pain the lines on this track--so I could be there for photo documentation purposes. This was repeatedly delayed because additional work was needed to finish the surfacing (after the original crew had left). Then I drove by and it already had lines on it. This was constructed in the '80s with the chute on the wrong side of the track, so this school runs sprints and short hurdles backwards on the backstretch (to take advantage of the strong pevailing wind). The new installation included an additional short chute on the home stretch, enough of a chute to allow hurdles to be run on the home stretch in all 9 lanes. But to my surprise, they did not mark the home stretch for 110HH. Instead there is a start line 112.75m before the finish line (about 9 feet longer than it should be, obviously there is room for a proper start line) and there are no hurdle marks for 110H. The girls 100H marks are on that straightaway (meaning just the one race HAS to be run on the backstretch). The backstretch straight races finish at an odd (almost random) spot in the middle of the straightaway (finish line offset 30 yards/27.42m from the 300m start line/break line). I've been to meets here for 18 years and they have always had to move the timing crew back and forth across the field. to the school now owns an automatic timing system. The ramifications of this are either 1) they purchase a second camera or 2) they shut down the meet to move and recalibrate the camera for each straightaway race. The current administrators might not mind, but they didn't consider the future track administration. If an outside group uses the track, it is the same situation. It has to either rent a second camera or shut down their meet and move across the field a couple of times during the meet. If a meet is televised from here, four races will not finish in front of the camera. You might say this is not important, since they don't usually televise meet from small high school tracks, but I have televised two meets from this track already over the years. This used to have a 10m offset finish line but no longer. They also added a new tall fence to protect the backstretch sprint chute from exceptionally long, foul home runs from the nearby baseball field. Such an incredible waste in order to deliberately do things wrong. ! has barricades and uses them frequently.

 

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