While many coaches are worried about their team bringing home championships, Desmond Dunham his eye on a bigger prize.
The cross country coach at Wilson High School in Washington D.C. (now at St. John’s College High School, also in D.C.), who has been coaching for 17 years, said he measures his accomplishments by the success his athletes have later in life, once they’ve put their running shoes away.
More than 1,900 high school cross country runners christened the inaugural DCXC Invitational at Kenilworth Park in Northeast D.C. Saturday afternoon. They came from Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Delaware, Pennsylvania and North Carolina and battled for five hours on a warm fall afternoon.
[button-red url=”http://dcxc.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/#/team_totals” target=”_self” position=”left”] Team scores [/button-red] The meet split up varsity teams among classes, giving spectators eight chances to watch runners race against their peers. The format also switched up the invitational style in the middle of the season. Each race scored three runners, and the results compiled for all races led to Virginia’s James Madison winning the girls’ races over Lake Braddock, Ocean Lakes, Bethesda-Chevy Chase and Winston Churchill; Lake Braddock won the boys’ team title over Pennsylvania’s Cardinal O’Hara, Winston Churchill, James Madison and Gonzaga. Lake Braddock also won the combined boys’ and girls’ team title, over James Madison, Winston Churchill, James F. Robinson and Bethesda-Chevy Chase.
Thirty-three of the 62 All-RunWashington preseason runners competed at the Oatlands Invitational in Leesburg, with teams from Maryland and D.C. making it the first of the big opportunities this season for harriers to race their contemporaries from across the river.
It served as a debut for Weini Kelati, a recent transfer to Heritage, who moved to Virginia from her native Eritrea. She won the race in 18:12, just off the course record, despite stopping twice to tie her shoes. Loudoun Valley junior Andrew Hunter easily won in 15:21 over Walt Whitman senior Evan Woods, who ran 15:55.
Loudoun County’s cross country teams were gracious hosts at the Oatlands Invitational, but not pushovers.
Last year’s 3A state champion Andrew Hunter of Loudoun Valley continued to exhibit his dominance that has been budding since last spring to win in 15:21, and Heritage newcomer and Eritrean native Weini Kelati surprised the field with an early lead that was never threatened, despite a loose shoelace that forced her to stop twice. She won in 18:12.
Laid end-to-end, the races by the scoring five of a cross country team would stretch 15.5 miles.
As cool as that would be, it would take forever, so the Braddock Relays cuts it in half, gives the runners and atmosphere otherwise saved for high school football games and pits the teams against one another, one runner at a time.
When he last set foot on a track, all was right in Jim Vollmer‘s world. He was at the Maryland state track and field championships over Memorial Day weekend, working as a race official and silently cheering on his Poolesville High School runners, whom he coached in cross country.
He left the meet with genuine excitement and a feeling of satisfaction for the achievement of his runners on this sunny spring day. Senior Chase Weaverling capped a sensational senior year by winning the state title in the boys’ 3200 meter race. And the girls’ and boys’ 4×800 meter squads ran spirited efforts to finish third and fourth, respectively.
Every week during the cross country season, we’ll hear from our RunWashington coaches panel to learn what they liked about the most recent races, including some normative judgments that I, as a journalist, feel unqualified to make.
Local teams ran at the Monroe Parker, Great Meadows, Lake Forest, Seahawk and Brunswick invitationals, among others. The heat and humidity played a big part in slowing times down.
Dan Reeks believes in running. He knows what running did for him, and knows what running can do for others.
He started coaching in Montgomery County 43 years ago, during his early 20s. Back then he was a volunteer assistant for Paint Branch High School, and not necessarily volunteering by choice, either. Reeks, then a national-class runner, said he was concerned about an Amateur Athletic Union rule limiting how much money one could earn through coaching.
Adrenaline launches most kids through the first mile of a cross country race. Then reality catches up in the second mile, and when that’s compounded with a long sunny stretch and temperatures well into the 80s, the overly bold typically pay for their exuberance.
Unless they are Ryan McGorty.