Cody Gochenouer will visualize that he’s trying to hit the two-story chain-link fence that was erected behind the Napa High varsity softball field to protect the left fielder from his 165-foot discus heaves.
Cody Jensen will imagine he’s done the long jump for more than four weeks, that his natural ability in the event will help him overcome the years of experience most of his opponents will have.
Zack Scheinholz will pretend that placing third in the 100 meters at last week’s Division I meet means he can also place third with the other divisions competing.
It’s always a big mental exercise for the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section’s best track and field athletes when they square off in the Masters Meet each year, as they will today and Friday at Sacramento City College’s Hughes Stadium.
The top three finishers in each event will automatically qualify for the CIF State Championships set March 3 and 4 at Buchanan High in Clovis. Fourth-place finishers qualify as alternates in case one of the top three can’t attend the state meet, but they rarely get to compete.
People are also reading…
Gochenour and Jensen’s events will be held in their entirety today. Scheinholz will run in the preliminary heats of the 100 and 200 meters today, needing to place at least eighth to qualify for Friday’s finals.
Vintage’s Clark Lundeen will competing with Gochenour in the discus today. Five other local athletes will be competing only on Friday — Vintage’s Mackenzie Miller (3,200 meters) and Josh Trembley (shot put), and Napa High’s Tyler Brown (pole vault), Robert Wakerlin (pole vault) and Jason Priestley (shot put).
Gochenouer is the only local athlete making a return trip to the Masters Meet. He qualified for it last year with a seventh-place heave of 155 feet, 2 inches at the Division I meet, then threw just 145-4 at the Masters Meet. He hit that distance in his first attempt of the finals, then fouled on his last two throws and placed 13th.
He’s waited a year for a shot at redemption.
“As a junior, making it to Masters was a big accomplishment for me. But I knew I had to make it back, so I’m super excited,” said Gochenouer.
A two-year starter on the offensive line for the Napa High football team, he plans to continue his grid career with reigning Bay Valley Conference champion Solano Community College in the fall. Also on the line both years was Priestley, and Gochenouer said each keeps the other on his toes in the throws.
“I go over there and tell him I can throw better in the shot and he gets all mad and flustered and he tries harder and beats me,” Gochenouer said. “He comes up with all these nicknames for me.”
Napa High head coach Troy Gittings, a former thrower himself, said Gochenour always benefits from not thinking too much when he’s throwing.
“When you don’t perform as well at that level, when the competiton is in your face, it comes down to your mindset, what you’re thinking about. When Cody just throws it, he throws 160 plus,” the coach said at Wednesday’s practice. “When you think too hard, you don’t do what your body needs to do. Your head takes over. Look what’s happened to Tiger Woods. There’s nothing physically different about him; he might even be physically better. He’s just not there. His mind’s taking him places his body doesn’t know. Any sport’s like that, but especially these individualized sports.”
Moments later, he complimented Gochenour on hitting the fence with a throw.
“Right now he has a lot of confidence because he’s hitting the fence,” he said. “We’ve talked to him about having a different (mental) approach this week, taking two warmup throws and then shutting himself down and just wait, relax and get in the ring and throw how he knows he can throw. If he throws how he is capable of throwing, like he’s throwing today, he’ll make it to state.”
Gochenour doesn’t overthink much when working out by himself on campus. As a result, Gittings said, the school had to put up the fence to protect the softball players.
“We’re actually going to get a plaque that says ‘The Fence That Cody Built’ and put it on the fence,” Gittings said of the play on the former Yankee Stadium being nicknamed “The House that Ruth Built” to honor legendary home-run hitter Babe Ruth. “They built that this year just because of him. It was a safety issue. He kept throwing the discus on the softball field.”
Gochenouer’s best career mark is still the 158 he recorded late last season. His best this season is a 156-3 at the Monticello Empire League Championships two weeks ago.
Gittings said Gochenour isn’t as strong as last year because he’s not in the weight room getting ready for football, as next year’s Napa High players have been doing the last few weeks.
“His form and technique have to be better,” the coach said.
Derrick Holland, Napa High’s throws coach since 2006, said Gochenour has been a pleasure to coach. Holland added that Gochenour isn’t far from the school record, 165-1, which was set in 1989 or 1990.
“He’s defininitely hit that in practice,” Holland said. “That’s why I tell him ‘Just think it’s practice.’”
Gochenour thinks he’ll be able to focus today.
“I just need to calm down and drop all my work I’ve done all day and don’t think about it and just focus on my technique and let it fly,” he said.
Scheinholz hopes he doesn’t have to fly from one race to the next like he did at the Division I meet last week. He said it was a factor in why, after placing third in the 100, he was just eighth in the 200.
“Last week I ran the 100, got my stuff, changed clothes, walked back to stands and probably sat down for a minute, put stuff back, looked for my mom for about a minute and a half, and then Coach found me and said ‘Hey, your scratch time (for the 200) is in two minutes so you’d better get down there.’ They were running a little late, but I was really not relaxing very much between those two races,” Scheinholz recalled. “I felt I ran the best race I could under the circumstances, but I think it can be a lot better. The 200 is one of the toughest races to do. But tomorrow, with so many more people, the gap between races will be greater and leave me that much more recovery time.”
Gittings said Scheinholz has improved every week. He ran the 100 in 11.03 seconds last week and has another year to try to break the impressive school record of 10.6.
Jensen and Scheinholz pushed each other the last two seasons in the sprint, until Jensen decided to try the long jump during a home dual meet against Fairfield a month ago.
“I just tried it for fun and my first jump was like 20 feet,” he said. “Even after that, I didn’t practice it much because I was still focused on sprinting. It was chance to grow. That’s what I want. I was fast, so I felt it was something I could do good at. , so I definitely didn’t think I’d make it this far. But one day in practice I jumped over almost half the pit, which is 22 feet, and in a meet I went 22-3 but scratched by an inch. My foot crossed the line, by like a toe.”
Jensen, the MEL Offensive Player of the Year as a running back last fall, plans to join Gochenour, Trembley and Lundeen on the Solano football squad in the fall.
“I did the triple jump last year,” he said. “But I hurt my knees too much, and I didn’t want to mess them up before football.”
This is first Masters Met, running back at Solano JC.
Scheinholz missed his entire junior season, well almost, due to a torn right hamstring during the 4x100 relay.
“I ran the first 60 meters of the first race of the first track meet of the year,” he said with a sigh. “I rehabbed it from March to July,” he said.
He said it was compounded by the fact he’d torn his left hamstrong the summer before.
He make sure he would make it to the postseason this year by stretch and lifting weights differently.
“Instead of focusing so much on the quads, which is really popular for getting that power, I balanced the whole lower region of my body — a lot of hamstring workouts and calf workouts.”
He said he was surprised he was able to qualify in both sprints.
“These last two weeks I pulled it out of this air, and the hard work that I’ve been doing has finally been paying off,” he said. “I’m seeded seventh in the 100, and (making the state meet in) the 200 will be a stretch, but then again I thought that before last week.
“The 100 is such a great race that first, second and third are a blink apart. It’s a tedious effort tot shave that five hudredths of a second off your time, but that much of a difference can put you from third to first, especially at these big meets.”