When Santa Maria High School senior Cesar Ayuso started running cross country for the first time his sophomore year, neither he nor his Saints teammates knew what winning meant or felt like.
But over the past three years, Ayuso has witnessed himself and his team grow from the ground up. With unwavering hard work and a stubborn will to be on top, Santa Maria has leapfrogged its competition this season and become the team to beat in the Los Padres League (LPL).
Their progress reached a pinnacle on Oct. 4 when the Saints took home first place in the LPL Mid-Season Duals at River Park in Lompoc. It was a true team effort, with Ayuso leading the Saints in third place while three of his teammates finished in the top 10.
“Going into the race, I definitely knew that we were confident,” Ayuso told the Sun. “We already had a couple races going into this season, so we knew where we were at. It feels amazing. … Having put so much work and finally being first, it feels well deserved.”
Prior to his sophomore year, Ayuso couldn’t have pictured himself leading a top cross country team. His sport was soccer, and didn’t see the appeal of competitive running.
“Running competitively, I never saw that as fun,” he said. “My first season, that’s when I started to just really like it.”
Ayuso initially joined the team because some of his friends were playing and he liked coach Brian Wallace. But he quickly got hooked to how cross country rewards your hard work.
“The first season I wasn’t that great, but just improving and having that accomplishment of being able to improve every time, that was what really kept me there,” Ayuso said.
He credited Wallace for pushing him and his teammates to run the extra mile. Wallace’s commitment and competitive mindset trickled down to the runners.
“I would say mostly it was coach Wallace, him having pushed running so much on us, and running in the offseason,” Ayuso said. “He told us that to win, we’d have to run lot.”
Now that the Saints have tasted victory, they don’t want to lose it. Ayuso said the team’s ultimate goal is to win the LPL finals and advance to the CIF finals, something the program has yet to accomplish in recent memory.
“As a team, we’ve been here for three years now, so we definitely know how it feels to have not been that good and finally be good,” Ayuso said. “We are definitely driven to win it.”
This article appears in Oct 19-26, 2017.