Finishing the season strong, the men’s track and field team placed a solid second place in the South Coast Conference finals while the women finished in a strong third place position.

The men finished behind Mt. SAC, which had 214 points but ahead of third place Cerritos which had 112 points. The women were topped by champions Cerritos, with 296 points and second place Mt. SAC with 215 points.

“Overall, both teams performed well,” coach Dean Lofgren said. “But we just couldn’t catch Mt. SAC (and the Cerritos women) who just had much larger teams than ours and outscored us.”

EC will travel to Bakersfield Saturday to compete in the Southern California Preliminaries.

“We anticipate that both teams have a good shot of breaking into the top ten in Southern California,” Lofgren said. “Possibly even the top five. We’ll do our best to make it happen.”

The Warriors had three men finish with championship medals at the Cerritos meet.

Steve Calise won in the 1500-meter, Jacob Weintraub won a championship in the shot put and discus and Garrett Till won in the high jump category.

For the women’s team, Megan Adams won a championship in the 3,000-meter steeplechase with a time of 11:44.40, which is also the second best time in the EC history books.

Shot putter Nai Leni, recorded 45′ 9.75″ in her competition and took first place at the meet.

These are a few of the athletes who will represent the Warriors Saturday in Bakersfield and who will look to qualify for a spot in the state competiton in two weeks.

“We have a large contingent going to the Southern California preliminaries this weekend,” Lofgren said. “We qualified twenty seven women into eleven of the women’s events and we also qualified twenty nine men into the twelve men’s events.”