Indoor Track & Field was once huge in the Southland!

It’s indoor season everywhere, including Fresno, but here …   From 1960* through the early 1990s the months of January and early February saw indoor meets with national and international competitors at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, the Forum in Inglewood, Long Beach Convention Center, San Francisco’s Cow Palace, Oakland’s Coliseum, and San Diego’s Sports Arena – the site for the end-of-the-indoor-season invitational. World and American records were set at all those venues. There was usually an invitational community college mile relay included in the evening program. Special high school events were also held during the evening’s featured program.
   Today thanks to the tireless enthusiasm of Bob Fraley, Fresno State’s head track and field coach, the Save Mart Arena on the campus of Fresno State will host an all-day indoor extravaganza on Martin Luther King’s birthday, January 21, 2008. A gentleman named Fred Arnold donated a new one million-dollar state-of-the-art indoor track in memory of his wife Madeleine and the program is a multi-faceted approach to stimulate our sport called “Run for the Dream.”
    From 10 a.m. until noon a 4-way women’s meet between Hawaii, Cal Poly, Cal State Stanislaus, and Fresno State will take place. From 3-5 p.m. a California High School Dream Team Championships will be held. The evening will conclude with a “USA vs. The World” Visa Series meet featuring elite-level competitors.
*The first indoor meet in Southern California was the Los Angeles Times Indoor Games in February of 1960 at the Sports Arena next to the Coliseum. Two community college mile relay sections were run with LACC and Glendale winning the two races. The meet included a few special high school events, and the meet took only two hours and 20 minutes to complete with 12,433 in attendance. There were no women’s events on the program (1960).