DAILY PILOT HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETE OF THE WEEK:

By now, Megan Kim will know how fast she needs to run and how far she must jump.

If she had it her way, the track and field marks would not matter. But they will today for the Sage Hill School freshman.

Kim will compete in the 100- and 200-meter events and the long jump at the CIF Southern Section Division IV preliminaries at Carpinteria High.

Two days before the meet, Kim didn’t even know the location of her next challenge. She asked Justin Stroud before he took off on the runway at Concordia University.

“Where are we going again?” Kim said.

Stroud looked at her in disbelief.

“Carpinteria!” Stroud answered.

Kim has never been to or heard of the small northern town near Santa Barbara. Off Highway 101, close to a famous exit, Santa Claus Lane, once home to a famous Santa Claus statue, is where Kim will experience the CIF track and field postseason for the first time.

But there won’t be any gifts handed out at this competition.

The top nine in each of her events advance to the finals. Coach Nate Miller says no Sage Hill girls’ athlete has ever qualified for the finals in the 100, 200 and long jump.

“That will be really challenging for her to make it because there’s just a lot of good sprinters,” said Miller, adding that Kim will have to most likely run a personal-best 12.5 in the 100 for a chance. “I think her strongest event is probably the 100, but that’s also the most competitive event.

“The long jump is one of those events where you can all of a sudden improve by a foot. We’ve seen some flashes from her in the long jump.”

As to how far her leaps have been in the days leading up to the prelims, no one can tell you. How fast? Miller said they don’t measure distance or clock times during practice.

“We don’t want them over-thinking,” Miller said.

Miller rarely has to worry about Kim. Good or bad, she doesn’t dwell on the past.

Last week was a good week. She won the 100 in 12.9 seconds and the 200 in 27.25 at the Academy League championships at Saddleback College. She flung herself to a third-place finish in the long jump at 14 feet, 9 1/4 inches.

The proudest moment for Kim came in a different event. She held onto the baton, anchoring the 1,600 relay to a finish, a rarity for Sage Hill. It didn’t matter that the relay team missed moving on to today’s prelims.

“Pretty much every single [time], except for the last one, we D.Q.’d, or we dropped [the baton], or something happened,” Kim said. “I don’t remember [our time]. I remember that we didn’t D.Q. We were just really happy. That was like our goal.”

Other than that goal, Kim didn’t set out to accomplish much when she took up track and field.

Instead of getting her own spikes before the season, she grabbed her sister’s. Kellee, now a senior, wasn’t going to use them. Kellee ran sprints last season at Sage Hill, but Kim said Kellee decided to focus on theater at school and club soccer before she heads to Harvard University.

Kim tried convincing her sister to come out.

“She was already getting pressure from other people,” Kim said. “I just let it be because she had theater. She’s actually kind of been stressing herself out.”

Now that’s one thing Kim won’t do today. They say running and jumping are great stress relievers.

DAVID CARRILLO PEÑALOZA may be reached at (714) 966-4612 or at [email protected].