Reyes Takes Nostalgic Trip Back to the Top : Orange Glen Junior Wins Twice; Teammate McGill Adds Triple Jump

The old codger, now 18, had once run faster, had once jumped farther.

“I was beginning to feel like an old man,” said Glen Reyes.

Saturday, Reyes postponed the arrival of Remember-When-I-Could days by winning the long jump and the 100-meter run at the San Diego Section track and field championships at Balboa Stadium.

Reyes’ friend Lenny McGill won the triple jump as the Orange Glen High School juniors qualified for their first trip to the state championship, June 3-4 at Cerritos College. Orange Glen’s boys finished third with 39 points, behind Mt. Miguel and Morse.

Reyes went a legal 23 feet 6 inches in the long jump. His winning time in the 100, produced against a 1.6-meters-per-second wind, was 11.02 seconds.

McGill went 49-6 in the triple jump, tops in the county this year and one-quarter of an inch farther than the favorite, Charles Huff of La Jolla.

Each credited Reyes’ wondrous freshman season, in which he jumped 23-5 and ran a 10.8 100, with helping him win Saturday.

For Reyes, the history lesson benefited his body and his mind.

Reyes discovered that his initial step in the 100 used to be about a foot shorter and that his arm motion used to be far more compact.

“As a freshman, I was so much better, to tell you the truth, I was getting pretty . . . about it,” he said.. “It all got me fired up. It’s all part of aggressiveness,” he said.

He also wanted to purge his memory of his first performance in the championship two years ago. In that meet, Reyes, who last season was sidelined by a hamstring pull, entered among the top three favorites in each event but finished fifth in the 100 and sixth in the long jump.

McGill, a spectator at that meet, likened Huff’s touted position Saturday to that of Reyes as a freshman. Huff, a senior, had gone 49-6 last week in the preliminaries, beating McGill by nearly three feet.

“I could come in and have fun,” McGill said. “I had no pressure.

“Last week, I had controlled jumps. This week, I wanted to take guts-out, go-after-it jumps. I wasn’t disappointed about (the preliminaries). I thought it would work in my favor, that it would put the pressure on him.”

Said Reyes: “Lenny learned how not to do it from me . . . That aggression is what it was all about. We both decided that we were going to be aggressive and pick it up.”

Maybe because he had further to go, McGill has improved more than Reyes. As a freshman, he went 41-11. As a sophomore, 45-10.

McGill’s triple jump Saturday represented the fourth-best in the state this year. Tyrone Scott of Citrus Height Mesa Verde leads with a 51-3 mark.

“I’m not finished yet this year,” McGill said. “I want to find out if I can keep improving. I want to go 53 feet.”

Huff, who finished fourth in the long jump, said he was on the board on only three of his 12 jumps in the two events.

“I was expecting so much glory at this meet today,” Huff said. “The reality of competing hit hard.”