The Starlets Track Club was a high achieving girls track team. Coached by Dorothy Clinton with her husband Artie and their daughter Rachelle Clinton competing with THE Jennifer Lopez!
Dorothy became the youth chairperson at the Metropolitan Athletics Congress in the 90’s and then the Executive Director of the MAC as it was affectionately called. The
MAC was a prominent track and field organization brought to significance by Tracy Sundlun.
We added to the title to try to get the website vistors to crowdsource the facts on this one. We added in "Did she? Let's find out" to the title.
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Little Stick wrote:
The Starlets Track Club was a high achieving girls track team. Coached by Dorothy Clinton with her husband Artie and their daughter Rachelle Clinton competing with THE Jennifer Lopez!
Dorothy became the youth chairperson at the Metropolitan Athletics Congress in the 90’s and then the Executive Director of the MAC as it was affectionately called. The
MAC was a prominent track and field organization brought to significance by Tracy Sundlun.No, no, you don't understand! The Bronx is far from Staten Island!
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elduderino wrote:
you do now but not then wrote:
Im not the pinnacle of knowledge but NYS def ran the 16 back then and not the 15. YOU must be 15. She ran 35 years ago.
In NYS we changed to metric i the 80's and immediately men ran 1600m and women ran 1500m. Women never ran 1600m.
I ran in NYS hs in the 90s, I can tell you that we always called the 1500m the MILE and the 3000m the 2mile...we often ran them at the same time as the boys who were doing 1600m and 3200m....neither are mile or 2mile ...but that's what we called them.
regardless, 4:49 for the 1500m in hs is very respectable!493 -
Can we really actually prove that she never did under any conditions in any circumstances?
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If memory serves me correctly there used to be a publication available in the 1980s that was a compilation of the best 100 performances by high school track and field athletes. We used to send away for a copy every year. There might be another old-timer like me that remembers the editor/compiler of the publications (I believe he was a retired HS sports writer for the LA Times?)
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Er... wrote:
Someone already said this but it’s worth repeating for those of you who haven’t looked at a map lately. There is no way a young teen going to school in the Bronx in the ‘80s is competing on a track club based in Staten Island. Those may be Jennifer Lopez’s results but they’re not JLo’s.
The James Robert Parish biography of Lopez has a quote from her: "I did gymnastics, [later] competed nationally in track, and was on the school's softball team" (see pg. 14). Other biographies also say she competed nationally in track. That would square with her running at 1983 TAC age group nationals in Dayton, Ohio for Starlets which we know "a" Jennifer Lopez did.
On page 13 it also says her mother would drive her to Ballet Hispanico dance classes every week, which would have been a ~40 minute drive. It would have only been about twenty minutes more to get to SI from her house once a week, and we're not sure what their practice schedule was or where they met.
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...? Nobody cares what time someone ran the mile in in HS.
And yet here we are, 5 pages of not caring.
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escape from the bronx wrote:
Little Stick wrote:
The Starlets Track Club was a high achieving girls track team. Coached by Dorothy Clinton with her husband Artie and their daughter Rachelle Clinton competing with THE Jennifer Lopez!
Dorothy became the youth chairperson at the Metropolitan Athletics Congress in the 90’s and then the Executive Director of the MAC as it was affectionately called. The
MAC was a prominent track and field organization brought to significance by Tracy Sundlun.No, no, you don't understand! The Bronx is far from Staten Island!
it would be hours on the subway and a ferry. each way.
plus when she talks about her running, it's "i ran in HS..."
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NYS90s runnergirl wrote:
we always called the 1500m the MILE and the 3000m the 2mile...
Why would you do this?
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So does that mean that 4:50 is not that fast for a high school girls mile? It’s just not that fast?
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habs wrote:
The Imperative Voice Real8 wrote:
you do understand that staten island is almost in NJ and the bronx is up by westchester, right?
that it's possible on these articles you have "a" fairly commonly named jennifer lopez confused with "the" jennifer lopez.
she said she ran HS TF. as some have said, if she ran these type times, and if she's the 13/14 girl you think, she should also be putting up HS times even better than the youth nationals stuff.
i'd think someone putting up fast times would also do XC and show up there too.
i am sure she ran and could even have been good but she already misremembered the distance so her memory is glitched.
i looked up TX UIL at this time and it was right around a 5 flat to win state. went up to 505 in the early 90s.
Idk, the more I research the more I'm confident these results are for her. The age is a perfect match and I also see her softball results from the same paper, which would match with her known life. While the name is somewhat common I'm not seeing any other Jennifer Lopez reported in NYC in those years. And it's possible she just focused more on gymnastics and softball later in HS instead of track.
I'm thinking the "Little Stick" poster earlier in the thread probably has some inside information, because without a newspaper archive how would they know her club and coach corroborates. also for what it's worth, MileSplit published a post a few minutes after mine with the same articles saying it's her.
so what you're saying is someone from the bronx -- who went to a HS way up at the top near the water there, was constantly showing up playing staten island sports in the staten island newspaper. which is all but in new jersey.
there are many "jennifer lopezes" that show up living in staten island if you do a white pages search.
also, if you're this good, you would show up on both ends. you'd be in the paper for patterson HS results too -- the one team she does say she was on. "jennifer lopez won the bronx meet in 5:00." so to speak. and then as some have said, end of year performance lists. because at this point in time you could win texas' large school class in like 4:57-5 for the 1600.
and i do get it, yeah, i did the math, the years match.
i just don't think people get how drawn out transit is in big metropoles. i lived in london a bit. i lived SW side. i went to a lower division soccer game end of the tube line out north. it was like an hour and a half each leg. and given congestion it's actually faster on the tube than a car. and that's a 20 mile trip, nothing more.
this would be closer to 2 hours subway/ferry/bus.
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Glory Daze wrote:
Er... wrote:
Someone already said this but it’s worth repeating for those of you who haven’t looked at a map lately. There is no way a young teen going to school in the Bronx in the ‘80s is competing on a track club based in Staten Island. Those may be Jennifer Lopez’s results but they’re not JLo’s.
Lopez is a common Puerto Rican surname and there are a lot of Puerto Ricans in a lot of parts of NYC so you may be right but it really doesn't matter, does it? Nobody cares what time someone ran the mile in in HS.
But how many Jennifers were there?
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Er... wrote:
Little Stick wrote:
Jennifer Lopez was indeed an accomplished track athlete. Jennifer competed for the Starlets Track Club based in Staten Island and was coached by Dorothy Clinton.
Someone already said this but it’s worth repeating for those of you who haven’t looked at a map lately. There is no way a young teen going to school in the Bronx in the ‘80s is competing on a track club based in Staten Island. Those may be Jennifer Lopez’s results but they’re not JLo’s.
I haven't read the rest of the thread but just to confirm, CITIUS have posted some images/videos of her running as well as some of her former teammates
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as full of it as others wrote:
you do now but not then wrote:
Im not the pinnacle of knowledge but NYS def ran the 16 back then and not the 15. YOU must be 15. She ran 35 years ago.
They ran the 1500m. Winning time at states in '87 was 4:31.7
That is one event. The state meet. The federations ran 16. Did she say she ran at the state meet?
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A mile is technically 1609 meters. Lots of mile PR dreams crushed…
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NYS90s runnergirl wrote:
elduderino wrote:
In NYS we changed to metric i the 80's and immediately men ran 1600m and women ran 1500m. Women never ran 1600m.
I ran in NYS hs in the 90s, I can tell you that we always called the 1500m the MILE and the 3000m the 2mile...we often ran them at the same time as the boys who were doing 1600m and 3200m....neither are mile or 2mile ...but that's what we called them.
regardless, 4:49 for the 1500m in hs is very respectable!She didn’t run 4:49 in the 1500m. She just made it up during the interview
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The only way that fat azz could run fast is if she was chasing the ice cream truck.
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Immaterial. At this point she’d be hard pressed to run an 8 minute mile trying to get those curves around the track.
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Because of EPO
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Nnenna Lynch, who chairs the New York Road Runners’ board, had
a pretty strong career (US-ranked #4 at 5K and #6 at 10K in 1998). She posted a
picture of herself and Jennifer Lopez in a race at the 1983 Colgate Women’s
Games. It’s not proof of a 4:49 – mile or 1500 – but it's interesting nonetheless. .231
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