St. Joseph High School’s cross country team had a pretty tough season last year.
After qualifying for the CIF State Championships with a core group of seniors in 2013, St. Joe’s graduated six of their top runners and lost another to a transfer. The result: They struggled to keep up with the PAC-8 competition in 2014.
Senior Kiana Kawatachi, the girls’ team top runner this year, remembers the past few seasons well.
“Two years ago, we had an all-seniors team. We had more experience,” she recalled. “Then last year, it was like all freshmen. It was a change. We didn’t have our top five scorers anymore.”
Given the ups and downs of the team in recent years, coaches Luis Escobar and Matt Wuchner didn’t quite know what to expect from their young squad entering this fall.
“We had no idea what this team was going to look like,” Wuchner told the Sun.
The coaches and runners soon realized that a resurgence was brewing in St. Joe’s cross country.
“It was hard to tell if we would go to state [before the season],” Kawatachi said. “But after the first two meets, our team was looking really strong.”
“The whole dynamic changed,” Wuchner added. “Everyone came together.”
St. Joseph wrapped up its 2015 season on Nov. 21 by narrowly missing a trip to the state championships. The boys finished 11th in the CIF Southern Section meet, and the girls came in 13th. The state-qualifying schools finish in the top seven.
Junior Matt Reyes led the boys in the section race and Kawatachi paced the girls.
While youth and inexperience hurt the team’s success in 2014, the growing pains proved to be a necessary phase for the underclassmen’s development.
“We were a little more experienced this year, and everyone started to step it up,” Kawatachi said.
Led by Kawatachi, the girls’ team performed well each meet, finishing in the top 10 multiple times. They were a lock for the CIF section finals early on.
Kawatachi’s individual highlight of the season was taking first place overall at the Bellarmine-Jefferson Invitational in September.
“That was the first time in all four years that I scored so high,” she said.
The boys, meanwhile, took more time to reach their potential. They failed to crack the top 10 until the last few meets, sneaking into the section championships with a final surge of strong finishes.
Wuchner credits this season’s success to the improvement of the younger runners in addition to a collective embrace of a seldom-seen strategy in the sport of cross country: racing as a team as opposed to as individuals.
“The teams that tend to do really, really well run in packs,” Wuchner said. “This year, our kids decided they were going to train in packs and did their best to race in packs.”
For the girls, that pack included seniors Kawatachi and Taylor Costa, sophomores Clare Wheeler and Samantha Santa, and freshman Jenna Wellencamp.
“The top five girls, we started to stick with each other, push each other, and push the pace,” Kawatachi said.
For the boys, seniors Derek Martino and Arjun Patel, Reyes, and freshman Joseph Domingues regularly swapped positions in the top four throughout the season.
“Towards the end of the season, we had all four guys running under 17 minutes,” Wuchner said. “They did a really good job setting a new standard.”
Wuchner praised Martino in particular for bringing his leadership and dedication to the team, especially during the disappointing season last year.
“Martino’s basically been our team leader for two years now,” he said. “He’s stepped up big time. He was our veteran this year.”
Domingues also stood out this year as a freshman with a promising future.
“He is a really talented runner,” Wuchner said. “Kids were excited having him around. We were just fortunate enough that he decided to come to St. Joe’s.”
As a small private school, the St. Joe’s cross country team has a roster of only 30 runners, a “significantly smaller” team than others in the PAC-8, according to Wuchner.
Keeping the team healthy and fresh throughout the season was a challenge that bigger schools don’t have to consider.
“Where other teams have enough kids to rest, we have to run all of them every race,” Wuchner said. “We have to be pretty strategic on how we train them. If our players need to rest, we take a back-off day. Where other coaches would want to hit the gas, we’re hitting the brakes.”
With many of the team’s top runners returning next year, and a culture of focus and togetherness in place, the sky’s the limit for St. Joseph cross country.
“Our team decided to aim for state this year, and we almost made it,” Wuchner said. “The next couple of years, we’ve got ambitions to not just go to state, but to win state.”
Editorial Intern Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 10-17, 2015.