Lovington Cross Country - Part 1

My experience coaching cross country began the same way that my volleyball experience began, by volunteering. I was coaching track at the Junior High and because our 9th graders who showed ability and interest were allowed to move up and work out with and possibly compete with the high school team. As a result I started attending the high school practices with my athletes and developed a relationship with the high school coaches, one who was also the cross country coach. I encouraged my distance runners from the 1978 freshman team to run cross country in the fall of 1979 and asked if I could work wit the team when my volleyball schedule allowed. So my first year was in a very limited role but it was enough to convince me that I definitely wanted to coach cross country when the opportunity became available.

I attended the State Championship meet in Albuquerque with the team and my eyes were opened to the disparity in talent between the northern and southern parts of the state as well as the dominance of the Native American schools from north western New Mexico. Our girl's team won the District Championship that year and qualified for state. Unfortunately, they're first experience at the state meet was less than stellar and certainly no indication of what was to come. In 1979 a team was only made up of six runners with five scoring runners. Despite a very competitive 12th place finish from our top runner we ended up with no score as a team because we only had 4 of our 6 runners finish the race.

For the first two years of state championships for girls they combined all of the teams up to and including AAA and then had a separate division for AAAA. Tina would have been 6th place had they just scored us against the teams in our AAA division. The team that won our race was Laguna Acoma with an incredible perfect score of 15. Their six runners were 1,2,3,4,5,& 8. The most dominant performance I ever saw from a team at a state meet.

The next year, 1980, I took a much more active role working with the high school athletes. I would finish coaching my volleyball team and then go to cross country practice. Logistically it worked out for me because our junior high gym was being redone and we had to practice in the small gym at the high school. My 8th grade coach would ride back to the school with our volleyball teams and I would stay and train with the cross country teams. Double duty again. Volunteer at the high school again. But some more important experience for my coaching future.

1980 was the first year that I started doing newsletters for the cross country teams, a practice that continued all of my years at Lovington and Sierra as well as the three years that I coached at the University Club level in Colorado Springs. My high school coach, Marshall Clark always provided us with post meet results newsletters that were full of information and my college coach Don Ruh did as well. When I began coaching junior high track I remembered how helpful I found those newsletters and I wanted to do the same thing for athletes that I had the opportunity to work with. It is because of these result sheets that I am able to look back and remember so many of the good and bad times from my 29 years of coaching.

Top 1980 State Meet in Santa Fe
Bottom - 1981 Girls State Qualifiers

The 1980 state championship meet was on a really difficult course in Santa Fe. Not only did we have to travel north again and contend with altitude but the course was very hilly and a good portion of it was run in sand. I was really proud of the efforts of our kids on both teams. Once again our top girl would have been a top ten runner if the divisions were divided. Sylvia was 17th overall and would have been 8th in AAA. Both teams were District Champions but once again it was a different level of competition at state. Our boys finished 7th of 7 and the girls 12th of 12.

Once again Laguna Acoma was dominant as Native American schools took the top three spots. Laguna Acoma 36, Tohatchi 108 and Zuni 124.

One thing that came up this season was something that unfortunately would be a recurring theme throughout my coaching career.Looking ahead to the next season and counting on kids that should be returning to the team. The girl who our number 3 runner at state in 1979 only ran one meet in 1980 before she quit cross country. She was a good kid and an outstanding 800 runner in track but sadly she didn't have what it took to stay with cross country. And that's not a criticism track and cross country are two entirely different sports.

1980 State Championships - Santa Fe, NM

1980 was the first year that I found myself getting involved in one of the parts of prep sports that I dislike the most. Politics! The meet in Santa Fe was poorly run, no information was made available in advance of the meet regarding conditions, and the course was unreasonable for a high school cross country course (in my opinion). After the season I wrote a letter to the Executive Secretary of the New Mexico Activities Association sharing my concerns, he in turn passed my concerns on to the Athletic Director of the host school, Santa Fe High School. The bottom line is that both responses were full of rhetoric but I can say that the state meet was never held in Santa Fe again while I was coaching in New Mexico. I spent a lot of energy in 29 years fighting for fairness for all athletes.

My comments to my team in my newsletter after the meet started off with this:

"One of you came up to me after the race Saturday and said, 'Sorry Coach". I told that person then and I'm telling the rest of you now. None of you have anything to be sorry for. Every one of you went out and did the best you could under unbelievably difficult conditions and Coach Watkins and myself are both very proud to have worked with each of you. You all heard enough Coaches talking to know that I'm not making excuses for you. The course was ridiculous and there was no way that a state meet should ever have been allowed to be held at a place like that.

With the exception of Benny DeLaCruz from Hobbs 5th place finish, no southern runner got close enough to smell the leaders. Woods, the fine runner from Alamogordo who won our home meet was the second southern runner in class AAAA and he was 33rd. The four southern schools in 4A took the last four places in the team standings, Hobbs was 6th and Goddard 8th."

Those comments pretty well summed up my feelings about the meet and the disparity of talent between northern and southern teams. I saw some promise from the girls team though even though they were 12th of 12 in the combined division again they were only 3 points from 10th. I made sure to emphasize that in our team meeting on the bus afterward and while I don't think it made anyone feel any better right then. It was a coaching point going into the 1981 season when 3A was finally going to have our own division.

This picture does a better job of showing why going north to run hills was such a challenge for our athletes. When I returned to Lovington in 2013 after running a race in Hobbs I drove to where we used to do our "hill" workouts to take pictures. Unfortunately the "hills" were no longer there. What we ran on were piles of the material they used on roads in the area, caliche. Imagine dump trucks backing up and dropping pile after pile of this crushed rock like material and you can visualize what out hill workouts consisted of. Running up, over and back on these piles of caliche. It actually helped by providing psychological as well as physical preparation. In the picture below taken of a postcard of Lovington the green area in the upper left corner is Chapparal Park where we ran our home meets and just to the northeast corner is where the caliche hills were located. Those hills taught me the importance of making the most of what you have when it comes to training. We could have complained about nowhere to run hills, instead we improvised and made the most of what was available.

No Hills! As far as the eye can see!

In 1981 I officially became the coach of the girl's team. Since I was still coaching my last season of junior high volleyball I don't know if I was actually paid for the cross country position. I was going to be the varsity girls track coach that spring so it was a normal transition into being the head girl's cross country as well. The truth is that I was probably still volunteering because we had to fight for everything we needed to get cross country the respect it deserved as a sport and not just off season conditioning for track. As a matter of fact, early pictures of the 1981 team show the girl's still wearing track uniforms for races. By the end of the season we convinced someone, school, booster club, not sure who to buy uniforms for the cross country teams. This wouldn't be the last time in my coaching career that I had that fight.

The summer before the '81 season is the first time that I started giving my athletes summer newsletters with advice on how and what to do so they might come back in the fall with at least some preparation for the upcoming season. It didn't work any better for the majority in 1981 than it did when I finished coaching cross country in 2004. With very few exceptions whatever my athletes accomplished they did within the 12 weeks of the season. Some didn't even get 12 weeks because they were still working when the season started if it started before classes did. The bottom line is that we had to do the best we could in a very short season with the majority of athletes doing nothing in the off season. I learned early to maximize the little time I had to work with a team and it was helpful throughout my entire career.

This was the year that I started making sure that the kids were aware of the tradition of the program. Despite the fact that it was a young program I knew that an awareness of the past could encourage the future. When athletes have tangible goals it is amazing to see how much their interest and effort improve. This was the very first "All Time" top 10 list that I did for my team.

First "History" of the Lovington Girl's XC program

"History" after the 1981 Season

There were other changes that I started when I "officially" became the girls head coach and the changes were incorporated by the coach of the boys team as well. I started providing much more detailed newsletters both premeet and post meet. The premeet sheets would provide as much information as I could find about our upcoming competition as well as expectations, itinerary, and other things that the athletes needed to know to be ready for a meet. Post meet obviously included team and individual results as well as comments regarding performance, effort, areas for improvement, and highlights.

The handouts also included excerpts from books or articles that I felt could be helpful, quotes from other coaches and athletes and what to expect throughout the remainder of the season. Grades and goals were mentioned in almost every newsletter as well as anything else that the coaches felt would be helpful to the athletes. They were also a place to reiterate what was said in team meetings in a more permanent format. There was a lot of time spent emphasizing character, behavior and grades. I learned the value of these handouts when I was a high school athlete myself and hoped that they would be found useful by the athletes I coached as well.

Finally another thing that I started doing in 1981 and carried over through 2004 was a 2000 meter time trial on the track. We even kept records from year to year with all time 2000 meter performances. Once again this was used to motivate current runners to beat past runners and run times that future runners would have a tough time beating. This was the first time many of the athletes had ever run against the clock at anything longer than a mile and it was hoped that they would realize their potential to go farther. We did it on the track because it was a more controlled environment and made it possible to encourage the kids throughout the time trial.

We won the District Championship again and once again qualified for the state championship meet that was moved back to Albuquerque. For the first time the girls were competing against only 3A teams. Once again the race was dominated by northern teams, as a matter of fact we were the only team from the southern part of the state, but for the first time in school history we beat another team at the state meet and finished 6th of 7. The fact that we were the only southern team showed how new the sport still was for girls in New Mexico. Our top girl was 14th and she was almost 2 1/2 minutes behind the winner, a sophomore from Zuni. It was obvious that the meet needed to be held in the northern part of the state because that's where the majority of the schools fielding cross country teams were located. While it was understandable that didn't mean we had to like going to run at their altitude and on their hills in their neighborhood. My final newsletter comment that year was:

"Gary Jenkins 9th place finish was an outstanding effort and also would have earned him 2nd team All State honors. I think everyone who knows the situation knows that Gary would have placed higher if we could get the northern people down on some flat lands. That's not going to happen though, so we'd better learn to live with it and be better prepared if possible next year".

The meet never did come south at least as of 1985 when I left New Mexico but just beating one team gave the girls the confidence to work harder to be better prepared for future state meets.