Belen High School Hosts Jim Burke Quad Track Meet April 2
With a 4:25 seed in the 1600 and 19 boys in the 100 meters, the Jim Burke Quad at Belen's Eagles Stadium was Valencia County's deepest early-season track test.
Nineteen sprinters from four schools entered the boys' 100 meters when Eagles Stadium in Belen hosted the Jim Burke Quad on April 2, a meet that brought together Belen, Los Lunas, Valencia and Socorro high schools for one of the outdoor season's first competitive pressure tests across Valencia County programs.
The sprint fields were among the most closely matched on the card. In the 100, Belen's Ted Cisneros and Los Lunas' Michael Storms headlined a group whose seed times ranged from the low-11-second range into the mid-12s. The boys' 200 meters drew roughly 20 entries across all three county schools, making it one of the widest head-to-head matchups of the day and a reliable barometer of where each program's depth sits entering the back half of the regular season.
Middle distance told a sharper story. Sixteen boys entered the 1600 meters, with Belen teammates Marcos Marquez and Ambrosio DeAnda near the front of a field that spread from approximately 4:25 at the top to the mid-to-high 4:40s. A 4:25 seed at a quad this early in April signals genuine state-meet ambition; coaches and parents tracking Marquez and DeAnda will want to see whether that benchmark held or improved on race day.
The hurdles and relays rounded out the competitive picture. Los Lunas entered multiple athletes in the boys' 110-meter hurdles, and relay squads from Belen, Los Lunas and Valencia were all on the card. Relay combinations at this stage of the season are rarely final; coaches use quad meets to audition lineup options, rotate training-fatigued legs, and identify which four-person orders hold together under competitive conditions.
Socorro's presence added a calibration point beyond the county rivalry. As a visitor from Socorro County, the Tigers gave Belen, Los Lunas and Valencia a useful external reference before district seeding begins.
New Mexico's state-meet qualifying system rewards athletes who hit specific marks during the regular season, and a field this size, with 16 entries in a single distance event and sprint seeds already touching the low 11s in early April, creates the right competitive density to chase those windows. Performances from Jim Burke now feed directly into district seeding calculations and shape training loads heading into mid-May championship meets.
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