Moorpark First With Its Seconds : Track and field: Raider women’s team takes WSC crown despite lack of a first-place winner.

SANTA BARBARA —  Who says you can’t win a track-and-field title without some first-place finishes?

Certainly not Moorpark College Coach Manny Trevino, whose women’s team won the Western State Conference championship Saturday at Santa Barbara City College.

The Raiders totaled 130 points, despite not winning an event. Defending champion Santa Monica, led by former El Camino Real High standout Vanitta Kinard, was second with 122 points, followed by Cuesta with 119.

Santa Monica, powered by Kinnard’s four victories, won seven events, but Moorpark countered the win-fest with seconds, thirds, fourths. . . .

As Santa Monica Coach Tommie Smith said, “We won a lot of events, but we didn’t get the winning places. We didn’t get the seconds, thirds and fourths.”

Trevino agreed with Smith.

“I think having two people in a lot of events really helped us,” Trevino said. “We didn’t have any big winners, but we scored in a lot of places.”

Heather Hanger and Avonya Linton paced Moorpark.

Hanger placed second in the 400-meter low hurdles (67.12 seconds), third in the 100 highs (wind-aided 15.80), sixth in the shotput (31 feet 8 1/2 inches), seventh in the discus (103-9) and ran legs on teams that finished second in the 400 (49.95) and 1,600 (4 minutes 10.15 seconds) relays.

Linton placed second in the 200 (26.14), third in the 100 (wind-aided 12.38), fifth in the 100 hurdles (16.23) and ran legs on both relays.

“We scored a lot of quiet points,” Trevino said.

“You don’t really notice until you add them up.”

It was hard not to notice Kinard or Josephina Sanchez of Ventura.

Kinard, runner-up in the triple jump for El Camino Real in the 1993 State high school championships, won that event with a wind-aided mark of 39-4 1/2. She also had victories in the 100 highs (15.11), 400 lows (65.28) and long jump (wind-aided 19-4 1/4), and ran legs on victorious relay teams that timed 49.08 and 4:08.23.

Sanchez, the 1994 WSC cross-country champion, won the 1,500 in 4:56.38 and the 3,000 in 10:57.53. A week earlier, she had won the 5,000 in 18:51.5.

The men’s meet was expected to be a showdown between defending champion Bakersfield and Moorpark, but Ventura and Glendale made it a four-team race.

Bakersfield, behind 100 and 200 champion Brandon Crockett, pulled away to win with 195 1/2 points, followed by Moorpark (164), Ventura (137) and Glendale (124 1/2). Moorpark scored in 17 of 20 events, but Bakersfield had superior depth.

Jeff Beam and Andy Szilagyi each won events for Moorpark.

Beam, the school record holder in the pole vault at 15-11, cleared 15-0 to lead a 1-2-4-5 Raider finish that was worth 27 points. Szilagyi spanned a wind-aided 22-3 1/2 in the long jump and tied Bakersfield’s Tasheeri Walker for first in the high jump at 6-8.

Ventura was led by Kris McLucas, who won the 110 high hurdles in a wind-aided 15.06 and the 400 intermediates in 54.44.

Although his time in the intermediates trimmed approximately two seconds off his personal best, McLucas was most pleased with his fourth-place performance in the high jump.

“That 6-6 was out of nowhere,” he said.

“I haven’t been practicing much in that event because of tendinitis (in my knees), but I was able to get a (personal record).”

In other events, Glendale’s Isaac Turner won the 400 in 48.6 and ran a 47.2 anchor leg on the Vaqueros’ 1,600 relay team that placed first in 3:20.09.

Turner has the second-fastest time in the state in the 800 (1:49.93), but Coach Tom McMurray wanted to work on sharpening his speed Saturday.

Turner will be back in the 800 in next Saturday’s Southern California preliminaries.