California Division 5 state champion leads three San Diego Section athletes, including Lopizzo from La Costa Canyon and Dailey of La Jolla, competing at familiar venue of Balboa Park's Morley Field at 43rd edition of national final

By Landon Negri for DyeStat

The journey for Micah Sanchez to compete Saturday at the Champs Sports Cross Country National Championships, a trip years in the making, included a literal climb up a mountain.

Now, Sanchez comes back down that same mountain to reach the summit of his high school career.

Sanchez created that possibility at Balboa Park’s Morley Field after enduring a season in which his entire school moved to the rural mountain community of Alpine, some 25 miles east of San Diego along Interstate 8.

The senior from Liberty Charter, a school of around 270 students, runs against the nation’s best at 10 a.m. PST in the 43rd edition of the boys championship race. He will be trying to follow in the area’s Division 5 success of Francis Parker’s Kenan Pala, last year’s national runner-up.

Sanchez will be joined by La Costa Canyon junior Gioana Lopizzo and La Jolla freshman Chiara Dailey as three San Diego-area runners enjoy a homecoming of sorts.

LIVE WEBCAST FOR CHAMPS SPORTS CROSS COUNTRY NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS | MICAH SANCHEZ INTERVIEW | GIOANA LOPIZZO INTERVIEW | CHIARA DAILEY INTERVIEW

Lopizzo finished as the West Region girls runner-up to Ventura sophomore Sadie Engelhardt on the 5-kilometer layout Dec. 3 at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut by a 17:43 to 18:05 margin.

Dailey took third in 18:11 to become the first La Jolla athlete to qualify for the national meet, with her and Lopizzo leading a group of seven California female athletes competing at 9:15 a.m. PST in the girls championship race.

Chavez said Saturday’s race has been a dream for much of his life.

“Ever since I was 10, I told my mom and dad that I wanted to run here,” Chavez said.

A dream is one thing. Making it a reality is quite another.

Chavez has had quite the journey, going from an 18th-place finish as a freshman in the San Diego Section Division 5 finals to placing 85th at last year’s West Regional to this season, when he won a section title at Balboa Park, and a Division 5 state title Nov. 26 at Fresno’s Woodward Park to a fifth-place showing Dec. 3 at the Champs Sports West Regional at Mt. SAC.

“It means so much seeing all my work pay off,” he said. “To perform in front of a home crowd is super exciting, especially on a national level.”

A year ago, Sanchez finished ninth in the Division 5 boys race at the California state meet in 15:42 in a race that included Pala, the individual champion, as well as fellow seniors Mark Trammell and Alexander Bobowski from Santa Fe Christian, in third and fourth.

Sanchez seemed to be set up well for his senior year.

But Liberty Charter’s lease in Lemon Grove was reportedly not renewed. Other locations fell through and Liberty Charter scrambled before finding the former Alpine Elementary School and settling there.

Liberty Charter’s cross country coach is Danny Sanchez, also Micah’s father. Going to Alpine brought the family full circle, as Micah is originally from the mountain community. Danny ran cross country at El Capitan High in nearby Lakeside.

“For about two months,” Danny Sanchez said, “we had nowhere to go and no one knew except for a few people.”

Even life after the move added a layer of difficulty. For one, Liberty Charter’s new home does not have a track. Much of the running is done on mountain biking trails. There is also little level ground in Alpine for sprint work or intervals.

“We have to run on dirt trails,” Danny Sanchez said, “and that can kind of get sketchy when the weather doesn’t cooperate.”

That means mud.

“It was kind of slippery, but we were still hitting our splits,” he said.

As an administrator, Danny was instrumental in the school’s move. As a coach, he was grateful for keeping most of the team together, despite the relocation.

He added that they’ve all become adept at finding workout locations.

Trails on a preserve called Wright’s Field near Joan MacQueen Middle School have proved useful. Another spot found was a tempo loop near Viejas Casino a couple of miles away.

“I’d say it gets us creative in working out, where to run, or how to use the terrain around us,” Micah Sanchez said. “There’s no room for flats anywhere. I think the longest flat stretch we have might be a mile, but it still has 30 feet of elevation gain.

“We’ve seen lots of snakes, too, on our runs. I’ve almost stepped on two, and I’ve gotten jump scared by three.”

His family, Micah said, had already been planning to move. The site of the new school just made that easier.

“We’ve wanted to be there for a while, so it was perfect timing for the school and our family to move here,” he said.

He added that the two teams at Liberty Charter total about 22 runners. With Sanchez leading the way on the boys side to an individual crown in 15:08, the Lions won the Division 5 title Nov. 12 at the San Diego Section finals at Balboa Park. They followed that with a seventh-place team finish at the state meet. Both were firsts for the school.

Danny Sanchez ran at El Capitan High and said he was on the first state-qualifying team that placed 14th in Division 2 in 1995. Sanchez said he sat his team down at the end of last year and showed them a picture of that team.

“I said, ‘This is going to be you guys next year,’” he said.

Micah has battled nagging injuries for much of his high school career, which also included the pandemic. An ankle injury, he said, shortened his junior year in track.

Success in the Champs Sports meets also runs in his blood. He said his mother, then competing as Tammy Kniffing, won a middle school national race when it was known as the Kinney meet in 1982.

And Micah hopes to bring a serious rooting interest to Balboa Park, where he estimated he’s competed in cross country about eight times. Asked how many of the 270 from school will be there, he said, ‘Yeah, most of them.’”

“I mean, it’s been pretty fun in a sense that I’ve just constantly reminded him and reminded myself that this is a really cool story,” Danny Sanchez said. “And it is not the prototypical way of an athlete getting to nationals.”

Lopizzo enters Saturday riding the wave of her best performances at the end of the season. The junior followed up her landslide Division 3 victory at section finals with a second-place finish at the CIF State Championship and last week’s runner-up to Engelhardt.

She said the year has ended “amazingly,” as she continues the La Costa Canyon legacy of Darren Fahy (2011) and Kristin Fahy (2018) qualifying for nationals.

“This season hasn’t been easy, but I was very blessed and worked very hard,” Lopizzo said, “so it was nice to see the rewards.”

Dailey enjoyed similar success, winning the Division 4 crown at the San Diego Section finals by almost a minute before finishing second at the state meet to Oaks Christian’s Payton Godsey, who also won the gold race Dec. 3 at the Garmin RunningLane Championships at John Hunt Park in Huntsville, Ala.

It was then that she really started thinking about nationals and she prepared for the West Regional this past week.

“I had it in the back of my mind in the beginning of the season, but I really have been thinking about it after state,” Dailey said, “because I’ve been trying to kind of focus on the next race, and then this whole week, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”