Track season has arrived.

Richard Rodrin Junior Angela Chan, one of the rookie pole vaulters full of potential, not to mention a fast hurdler and sprinter, flies through the air for a graceful landing.

The track team is a confusing bunch. It seems like a fanatic cult of insane people — about 180 of them to be precise — who like to run in circles, throw dangerous objects, leap into sandy pits and scale large heights with seven-foot toothpicks. The fanatics are immensely proud of what they do and defend their 19-year championship streak with a rabid ferocity.

This year, however, they’ve got their work cut out for them. The ’06 graduates gouged a huge chunk out of the track team’s talent pool. Track and field history makers Anna Li and Shelly Song, along with a dozen other swift and steady seniors, leave huge shoes to fill.

Yet even with the major loss of talent, winning All-City finals may still not pose much of a challenge.

The local competition is so weak that the team must trek out to southern California for any real self-improving challenges.

This will be the fourth consecutive year that the team will head down to Los Angeles to face the notoriously competitive southern Californian runners, who have had “more runners run in the Olympics than any country,” according to head coach Andy Leong. Leong has a healthy respect for this daunting competition — as well as a strong desire to prevail. “I have this bug up my butt worrying about getting our ass kicked,” he said to his team. “I got a lot of ridicule as a young coach from SoCal (coaches) and I’ve been inspired and motivated ever since” to prove our talent.

Only the best of the team will attend the Los Angeles meet over spring break. To many of the track members, this trip is the high point of the season — especially since the meet participants will get to go to Six Flags Magic Mountain — and they are working hard to defend their coach’s pride.

Of course, the variety of track events means that each event coach employs a different strategy for his athletes. Practice for the pole-vaulters is very quiet and intimate. Soft spoken, nurturing Coach Phil Lyons passes on tidbits of advice to each individual vaulter as they practice on a sad faded bubblegum-colored mat that screams for extra funding. “They’re a lot better than previous years,” Lyons said. “They’re very fast learners and they’re much further along that I expected.”

Laid back as ever, the throwers are easing their way back into the regular rhythm. Coach Brad Jobin is content to just let them practice throwing the shot put and discus for the first week. “We’re trying to get the muscle memory back,” he said. “Nothing like weight lifting. We’ll probably do that next week.”

The sprinters, on the other hand, are charging ahead in a pace much quicker than veterans are accustomed to, largely due to two-year sprint coach Sean Gwi’s competitive philosophy. When most sprinters are still struggling to get in shape, Gwi seems as if he’s trying to skip the transition phase.

Leong, equally pushy, is putting on the pressure and whipping the long distancers into shape. Just the first week of practice, Leong had them running one-mile warm-ups, 5.5 to seven-mile runs and the arduous five-mile hill loop of Stern grove.

His runners don’t seem too concerned, however. “It’s going pretty smoothly,” four-year veteran senior Cynthia Leung said. The runners’ confidence in their coach speaks bounds about the love and trust present in the team. Even the newcomers immediately respect the man.

“He’s the best coach I’ve had so far,” said senior Colie Smith, a successful runner who moved to San Francisco from Pennsylvania this year. “First off, he was a runner. Second off, he has the experience. Third off, he doesn’t take crap.”

Andy, as his runners call him, is as notoriously brusque and bristly as his mustache. He is known among Bay Area coaches for his signature frankness that sometimes offends. “As you get to know me you will find that I’m brutally honest to a fault,” he said to his long-distance team. “I’ll always tell the truth. I have gone to people and told them, ‘You suck.’ And the reason is because they were not working hard enough.”

While they may have their set-backs, the Lowell track team definitely has a few gems that stand out from the giant mass of red. Most eye catching are seniors Jamie Ngo (3200 meter), Leona Shum (400 meter, hurdles and high jump) and Colie Smith (800 meter) and juniors Bismark Navarro (100 meter and 200 meter) and Walker Weir (1600 meter) who all have a shot at state championships. Though their talents are already evident in practice, expect them to display their true brilliance at the first meet on Mar. 3 at Santa Rosa High School.