Allan Hancock College is enjoying a great track and field season. Even with the track team pushed to practice at Santa Maria High School because of the Hancock track’s poor condition, nine Hancock athletes were ranked in the top 10 in the Western State Conference in 13 different events. So why does track and field coach Louie Quintana think they’re doing so well this season?
“They’re working hard,” he said. “They’ve really dedicated themselves. They’re not just going through the motions.”
It’s not likely that these athletes could just go through the motions, even if they wanted to. Coach Quintana was in the middle of talking about the state conference when he spotted two of his athletes committing the cardinal sin of not hustling.
“You two gonna wait to hold hands? Let’s go!” he said. “Vamonos!”
He set them to running the length of the football field diagonally. Or at least they tried to run from the corner of the football field. That’s not far enough for Coach Quintana.
“Gentlemen!” he called. “The soccer corner.”
The soccer corner is a few yards farther back.
Quintana figures he’s been coaching for 25 years. He spent 14 years coaching at Righetti High School and one at Santa Maria. This is Quintana’s ninth season as Allan Hancock’s track and field coach.
The sport runs in the family: His son is an assistant track and field coach at Arizona State University, while Quintana and his brothers ran track and cross country in high school.
Coach Quintana refrained from calling anyone in particular on the team a star, but he did admit that, after all, the only actual “team” sport in track and field is the relay. Everything else is between the athlete and the clock or other athletes—oftentimes athletes from their own team.
To that end, he does have his standouts, some of whom include Chelsea Cassulo, currently ranked first in the Western State Conference for shot put, third in the javelin, and fifth in discus.
Shane Soden is ranked No. 3 in the conference in the 400 intermediate hurdles. He agreed with Coach Quintana that while everyone is contributing to the team during a meet, in the end it comes down to you and the clock.
“You want to better your time? You want to go faster? You’re the one who has to do it,” Soden said. “When you look at the clock [after a race] and you did crappy, you know you didn’t run that week.”
“Run that week” is what they do around here to train. Normal workout for a distance runner is, well, a whole lot of running. Monday is the hour run. Tuesday, they’ll run 500, 400, 300, 200, and 150 meters, twice. Wednesday is back to the hour run, and then Thursday is a half hour run so they can get ready for the Saturday meet.
Samuel Guillaume is honest about why he’s running track and field: to make him a better football player. But that doesn’t stop the powerfully built Guillaume from giving track his best.
He runs the 100 meter in 11.3 seconds—not too bad when you realize just what a big guy he is, and the fact that Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man, runs it in 9.69 seconds.
Coach Quintana summed up Guillaume’s and the rest of his team’s achievements: “If you wanna be good, you gotta work hard.”
Staff Writer Nicholas Walter became a journalist so he could be a better football player. Contact him at nwalter@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 16-23, 2009.