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.