Led by Canon, Tigers finish 1-2-4, but coach Lopez is livid
On paper, it looked more than impressive. Memorial’s cross-country team won its second straight NJSIAA North Jersey Section 1, Group IV title last Saturday in convincing fashion, outdistancing the closest competitor, Ridgewood, by nearly 40 points.
Individually, the Tigers placed first, second and fourth overall, with William Canon winning, Anderson Tejada finishing second and talented sophomore Luis Capellan finishing fourth.
Any coach would have to be happy with such a dominating performance, right? Well, don’t dare try to sell that to Tigers head coach Julio Lopez. In Lopez’ eyes, it wasn’t exactly time to do a victory lap around Garret Mountain Park in West Paterson, holding the state sectional trophy aloft. Lopez was downright livid after his team’s performance.
"We came here to run for times, to see where we’re at," Lopez said. "And they all ran slower than what they’re supposed to. It’s very disappointing. I don’t know what it is. There is no excuse. They were all 30 seconds slower than what they normally run. Maybe they were tired or something. But if they don’t wake up, we’re going to get killed in the Groups [Group 4 championships] next weekend."
Lopez came into the meet with gigantic aspirations, hoping to break Memorial’s record of 23 points, set when Lopez was a runner in 1976, in the middle of Memorial’s streak of five straight sectional titles. Maybe the idea of possibly breaking the record consumed Lopez’ way of thinking.
So even though senior Canon won the race overall in 16:32.20, with teammate Tejada as the runnerup in 16:57.20 and Capellan close behind in fifth (17:17.20), giving Memorial three of the first five finishers, the rest of the team fell behind, destroying all hopes of a record-setting performance.
Senior Luis Ortiz, who finished second in the same race a year ago and had posted a time of 16:26 earlier in the year on the same Garret Mountain course, ran poorly on Saturday, posting a time of 17:49.50, finishing 17th. It might have been good enough to nail down the state sectional crown, but not good enough to please the coach.
"Luis Ortiz was very disappointing," Lopez said. "If he runs even a bad race, he’s no worse than fourth. There’s no excuse for Luis Ortiz. There’s no excuse for any of them. I’m happy for Willie [Canon] that he won. I’m disappointed with the rest. If we want to be with the big boys, we have to do better than this. We wanted to have great times heading into next week. We didn’t get them."
Canon was happy, because he said it was the first time he won a big event since he was a freshman.
"It was a cold and windy day and the wind started to burn my lungs," Canon said. "I wanted to get in the low 16’s, but I couldn’t get there. We know that we need everyone to do well, but we did have three of the top five. That’s really good."
Obviously, not good enough for the hard-driving coach.
"Maybe we won’t train as hard," Lopez said. "But there’s no excuse for this. I don’t know what happened. I only know one thing that this is not going to make it."