Track & Field: McCord, Bender are masterful

By Matt Szabo

May 29, 2015 9:48 PM PT

NORWALK — Sage Hill School senior CJ McCord always strove to get back to the CIF State Track & Field Championships in the high jump.

Newport Harbor senior Hope Bender didn’t even run the 300 hurdles competitively until late April.

Their paths couldn’t have been more different. Yet, both McCord and Bender stepped up Friday night at Cerritos College.

The Yale-bound McCord and the UC Santa Barbara-bound Bender both delivered masterful performances at the CIF Southern Section Masters Meet. As a result, they’ll both be competing in the state meet next weekend at Buchanan High in Clovis, with preliminaries on June 5.

McCord and Bender also both medaled at Masters with top-three finishes. McCord tied for third in the boys’ high jump, clearing 6-foot-7. Bender was third in the 300 hurdles with a time of 43.04 seconds.

Sage Hill junior Chance Kuehnel was the third and final local competitor at Masters, also in the high jump. He failed to clear the initial height of 6-3.

The top six competitors in each event at Masters made the CIF State Meet, as well as anyone who met at-large standards. The at-large standard for the boys’ high jump was 6-7 and it was 43.08 in the girls’ 300 hurdles, so McCord and Bender would have qualified for state even if they hadn’t secured top-six finishes.

McCord, who finished second at the state meet as a junior by clearing a school-record 6-10 1/4, cleared 6-7 on his first try Friday to qualify for state before missing three attempts at 6-9. Sean Lee of Trabuco Hills and Quinten Pounds of Cypress each cleared 6-9 to tie for first.

“[Qualifying for state] was my goal coming into it,” said McCord, who cleared 6-9 last weekend to repeat as CIF Southern Section Division 4 champion. “It was really good competition. I didn’t know it would be this intense and this competitive.”

After his jumps were done, McCord went to the trainer’s tent and got an ice pack on his left knee, which he injured during the basketball season and also bumped during a freak accident at school this week.

“I fell during lunch this week over stairs,” McCord said. “I don’t know. It was stupid, but it’s a little banged up.”

Still, McCord likes his chances heading into the state meet.

“I think I feel pretty confident, knowing that I’ve been there once and I performed my best there,” he said.

Sage Hill jumps coach Ian Jennings agreed, after seeing McCord nearly clear the bar with his second attempt at 6-9.

“It was a little tough this season, him dealing with that knee coming out of basketball,” Jennings said. “The first half of the season, he just didn’t look like himself. But he stayed patient. We just put the focus on league finals, and if we could start a good rhythm from there through CIF, I had no doubt he would make it to state. We were just trying to get a nice uphill swing, and hopefully the state meet will be where he hits his peak on the right day.

“He definitely has the experience from last year. I’m just hoping we’re not so far behind that he doesn’t quite peak at state, that it happens say two or three weeks from now. But he’s been looking better in practice this year at this time than he did last year.”

Bender also is looking good going into her first state meet, even in an event she didn’t consider running seriously until winning it at the Orange County Championships on April 25.

“After that, it was kind of going to be back to business in the 400 and 100 hurdles,” Bender said. “[But] after the performance there, it was, ‘I think we need to stay here.’ That’s what we did, and here we are. I couldn’t be more excited.”

She finished second in Division 2 in the 300 hurdles last weekend at the divisional finals, setting an Orange County record in 42.51. The time on Friday at the Masters Meet was more than a half-second slower, but the goal was to make it to state. Bender did so, gaining momentum after she stutter-stepped leading up to the first hurdle.

Jasmyne Graham of Roosevelt won the race in 41.94.

“I think today I showed my inexperience a little more,” said Bender, who was cheered loudly by her friends in the stands, including Edison graduate Sierra Krenik, as she exited the track following her race. “It was a pretty ugly race, I think, but just to get it done and be on my way up north is incredible … I can definitely knock a couple of tenths [of a second] off going into next week.”

Although she has yet to run the perfect race in the postseason, Bender believes her inexperience in the race also can be a positive for her.

“I think it helps that I’m so new, because I don’t ever get relaxed in those races,” she said. “Each one is another test to see if I can do it again.”

Meanwhile, Sage Hill’s Kuehnel stayed humorous after his first Masters Meet experience. He hopes to return next year.

“Something to look forward to next year, right Chance?” McCord asked his friend with a smile.

Kuehnel appreciated the verbal alley-oop from McCord.

“Definitely,” he said. “I’m [owning] all these guys next year. It’ll be like you, but on steroids. [I’m going] seven foot next year.”

Cypress' Quinten Pounds scored 25 touchdowns this past season and racked up more than 1,300 yards of total offense. He later received first-team All-Orange County laurels as an all-purpose position player.

By Brian Whitehead | bwhitehead@scng.com | The Sun

PUBLISHED: July 9, 2015 at 12:00 a.m.

Jorden Pounds’ football career ended on Nov. 26, 2010.

On that night, Cypress hosted La Habra in the CIF-SS Southwest Division quarterfinals – a rematch of the previous season’s semifinal, which La Habra won, 35-21, on its way to a third consecutive CIF championship.

Pounds, a senior in 2010, had become Cypress’ best defensive player seemingly overnight. A 5-foot-11 wrecking ball at the linebacker position, he would later receive Empire League Defensive Player of the Year laurels and a third-team All-Orange County nod.

The first of his parents’ three children, Pounds led the 2010 Centurions in tackles, and his defensive unit stifled opposing offenses all season long.

NCAA Division I recruiters caught wind of Pounds late that fall, but they swarmed the third-year letter winner. An understudy the two years prior, Pounds had multiple offers from which to choose, and planned on deciding his future after completing his senior season.

On Nov. 26, 2010, his life took an abrupt detour.

“I’m where he’s supposed to be at,” said Quinten Pounds, Jorden’s younger brother and the 2014-15 Fullerton News-Tribune Boy Athlete of the Year.

Athletically, Quinten Pounds takes after his father and his older brother.

Blessed with vitality and born into an active family, Pounds spent most of his childhood outdoors, his mother at times refusing to let him back inside during the day. Four years younger than his brother, Pounds took his licks as a child, and later as a preteen, playing recreationally with older kids.

“I was always a little hard on him,” his brother admitted all these years later. “But it was because I saw the potential he had.”

The Pounds boys bonded on grass fields and blacktops, sharing with each other their love for sport. Inseparable they became.

“We did everything together growing up: soccer, basketball, football, it was an all-year type of deal,” Jorden said. “I remember seeing his growth and him coming into his own. At one point he was no longer my little brother. It was him. It was his own legacy, and that was awesome to see.

“He was my best friend … and sports were the gel that glued us together.”

Quinten Pounds played Pop Warner football in Cypress, at a field not far from his neighborhood high school, where his brother enrolled at in 2006.

As athletic and coordinated as he was growing up, Pounds remembers failing miserably in football games. Rarely, he said, was something outstanding not followed by something clumsy. On-target passes were dropped. Shoe laces, tripped over. Even when he’d score, he’d stumble into the end zone on occasion.

But the talent – those flashes of brilliance – was always there. And by seventh grade, Pounds had found his bearings.

“I knew he was going to accomplish his dreams,” his brother said. “I saw it before everyone else did.”

An eighth grader in 2010, Quinten Pounds remembers sitting in the stands as his parents hurried down to the field, their son writhing in pain.

Late in the third quarter of the Southwest Division quarterfinals, Jorden Pounds tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee while attempting to evade a La Habra blocker charging up the sideline. “A play I’d made 1,000 times in my career,” he said.

Cypress lost the game, 48-13, and Pounds lost his opportunity to play Division I football out of high school.

Pounds’ rehab lasted months, but once healthy, he had the opportunity to play football at Fullerton College. Weeks before the 2011 season, however, he re-tore his ACL, setting him back yet again. Nearly recovered a year later, Pounds tweaked the same knee while practicing at Cypress with Quinten, then a junior-to-be at the school.

Jorden Pounds called it a career shortly thereafter.

“That was a hard time,” he remembered. “My dream was to go and play Division I football. Me and my brother had that dream. But from there, I started to live my football career through my brother. … Watching him chase his dream, it was a blessing.”

Quinten Pounds wrote a letter to Jorden before his junior season, promising him he’d receive a Division I football scholarship.

He inked “4 JP” on his cleats that fall, then went out in 2013 and had himself a 15-touchdown campaign in which he amassed more than 1,000 yards of total offense. Defensively, he intercepted 10 pass attempts, earning him a third-team All-Orange County nod as a defensive back.

Recruiters from Division I programs – Colorado, initially, then Cal, Boise State and others – sent letters to his home by the masses, beginning one of Orange County’s hottest courting campaigns.

“I dedicated my junior year to my brother,” Pounds said.

The fraternal rivalry existing between the Pounds boys knows no bounds.

Last summer, the brothers spent hours between training sessions playing NBA video games. Quinten one weekday afternoon stubbed his toe while celebrating a last-second game-winner, throwing his weekend schedule into sudden disarray.

Pounds, a three-star athlete according to multiple recruiting web sites, had planned on attending a local University of Washington football camp that Friday. The following day, he’d attend a nearby Oregon State camp.

His parents, however, had paid only for the Oregon State camp, and Pounds’ mother feared he’d injure his toe again working out the day before.

It took quite a bit of sweet talking, but after convincing his mother to let him go watch the Washington camp, Pounds took his cleats, gathered whatever money he could and, unbeknownst to his family, paid for the camp himself.

Though Pounds worked out lightly that afternoon – a few routes, select one-on-one drills and skills challenges – Washington representatives saw enough of the senior-to-be to later offer him a scholarship. Six other Division I football programs ultimately offered him the same.

On Oct. 29, one month after his official Washington visit and one day before scoring twice in a narrow Thursday night win, Pounds verbally accepted the Huskies’ offer.

“Everybody seems like they really wanted to make you a better person, not just a better football player,” Pounds said during his announcement, which was held in Cypress’ gym before friends, family and much of the student body.

“It was crazy seeing all his hard work pay off, seeing people starting to catch an eye for him, looking out for his name and what he did,” Jorden said.

***

Pounds, 18, makes the extraordinary look downright rudimentary.

This past fall, he became one of the county’s most electrifying football players. He scored 25 touchdowns in 11 games and finished with more than 1,300 yards of total offense. He returned kickoffs and punts, and in Cypress’ Southwest Division playoff opener, he threw three touchdown passes as the team’s back-up quarterback.

Pounds at season’s end received Empire League MVP laurels and The Register named him first-team All-Orange County as an all-purpose position player.

“It’s like watching a college or NFL game,” Cypress quarterback Nick Buras said in September.

“A great player for us,” first-year Cypress coach Rick Feldman said. “Humble, puts his teammates first. Washington is lucky. He made us a lot better, and, again, he was just one of the guys until he got on the field, and then he was an animal.”

Pounds received consideration for The Register’s Boy Athlete of the Year award after again lettering in basketball and track and field his senior year. He graduated from Cypress in June and then spent his brief summer vacation training on campus.

Now at Washington, Pounds is living out his childhood dream of playing Division I football. He left behind his parents, however, and his brother and his 3-year-old sister, whose likeness he has tattooed amid sun rays and flowers on his right arm. “My biggest fan,” he called her.

No longer will Pounds be surrounded by friendly faces, awed teammates and coaches and members of his family. But, as he has the past four years, he’ll find familiarity and comfort in his brother’s pregame text messages: