Four legs move almost in unison. Two feet hit the dirt trail as two feet swing up and back. One pair runs just inches behind the other as Santa Ynez Valley Union High School juniors Brian Illes and Johnny Jimenez pace themselves on the backside of the Mills’ property, a few acres of open fields and oak trees smashed between private property and grape vines facing the Santa Ynez Mountains.
The boys are making their third round of the mile-long track David Jackson, the high school’s head cross country coach, lined out for them, and they’re on pace—a mile in 5 minutes and 32 seconds. It’s Nov. 7 and the team has a little more than a week to get prepped for CIF prelims.
On Nov. 5, the boys won the Los Padres League championship on a course near Cuesta College. Although, none of the runners finished first in that race, as a team, the Pirates’ first five runners finished strongly enough to tie Cabrillo High School for first place with a total of 60 points, and the team’s sixth finisher broke the tie.
“I can’t believe how often the sixth-runner rule comes into play,” Jackson told his boys before practice on Nov. 7. “It’s glorious.”
Micah Saunders came in 30th for the Pirates at 18:42.61, beating out Cabrillo’s sixth runner by three slots. Illes finished sixth at 17:01.56 with Jimenez right behind him in seventh at 17:09.78. Abe Cohen finished 10th, David Tyler crossed the finish in 16th, and Grehson Smith came in 22nd.
It’s the second time in the last three years that the Pirates have championed the Los Padres League, and the fourth year in a row the team has run in CIF prelims.
The army of 50 students that used to be the girls’ and boys’ cross country team is pared down to the top 10 or so boys’ runners as Santa Ynez gets ready to head to Mt. San Antonio College, also known as Mt. SAC, for the Nov. 15 qualifying race. The best cross country boys at the high school sat in a cluster at the back of Jackson’s classroom as he chatted with them before practice on Nov. 7. Restless legs bounced up and down, rattling the desk against the floor.
“It’s going to be one of the fastest races of your life, and I want you to be prepared,” Jackson tells his team before they head out to the Mills’ property. Using a projector and a whiteboard, he’d mapped out the course they would tackle that afternoon. He said the course they would be running a little later was similar to the conditions at Mt. SAC.
Jackson’s passion for cross country is obvious. His classroom walls are stacked with posters of runners and old Santa Ynez cross country jerseys. When he talks strategy, the boys listen. He ran cross country for Cal Poly and has been coaching ever since. Before moving to Santa Ynez, Jackson taught at Morro Bay High School for seven years and coached the cross country team. He’s been a special education teacher at Santa Ynez High for the last five years and has coached the team each of those years. Jackson stepped into the head coaching position at the beginning of this season.
Mt. SAC is famous for its cross country track: it’s where CIF prelims are held every year; the course is hilly and hard; and all the teams running have placed in the top four in their respective high school leagues. A little more than half of the Pirates gathered in Jackson’s room ran the course last year, when Santa Ynez made a run at the state championship and placed 10th in California.
“I’ve run it once and nearly died,” Cohen said.
“And you’re a very different person than you were a year ago,” Jackson responded.
The Pirates have come a long way this year. It’s a young team, with only one senior on the varsity squad as cross country heads into the post-season. The team started getting fit over the summer with two weeks of elevation training in Lake Tahoe, and while they had a couple of good races at the beginning of the season, Cohen, a junior, said everything changed in the Stanford race.
It was a hard, crowded, fast race with about 285 runners racing.
“Lots of competition, very fast competition,” Cohen said.
Illes came in first, running a 5K in 15:58, and Jimenez was right behind him with a time of 15:59. Cohen said the race helped build the team’s confidence. That was in September, and the team’s continued to strengthen its fitness with practice sessions similar to the one Jackson had lined up for his guys on Nov. 7.
Illes said the key to a race is focus.
“You have to get out fast, get in front, and stay in front,” he said.
The team will tackle the race in pairs, with its top runners—Illes and Jimenez—striving to stay at the front of the pack, the top 10 percent, and the second two—Cohen and Tyler—attempting to stay with the pack behind the front-runners, the top 30 percent. And the Pirates running behind the first four need to keep them within view for the duration of the race, Jackson said.
“We’ve got what it takes,” Jackson said, alluding to a repeat run at the state title. “It’s ours if we want it. Now we just have to do it.”
The team that started running as a group at the Mills’ property separated into obvious pairs after the first lap around the trail. Coach Ron Misner, who started the Pirates’ cross country program in the 1980s said the Mills’ property is a special place, and the team is lucky to be able to use it.
“Compared to when I started coaching, we’ve probably lost 50 percent of the property we used to run on,” Misner said, adding that it was lost either through development or purchase.
He thinks the boys have a pretty good chance of making it to CIF finals but said it’s going to be a lot harder to make it through to state. Misner added that this year’s team has a lot of strength and the first four runners are pretty solid, “willed and consistent.”
“We’ve got the experience there, they just have to trust in themselves and the training,” he said. “Nobody picked us to go to state last year, and we did it; there’s no reason we can’t do it again.”
Contact Managing Editor Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 13-20, 2014.