Follow the NOHS Boys Cross Country special all season long. This will be the first in a series of articles on the boys as www.ky.milesplit.com follows them each week.
Running With the Mustangs: Introduction
By David St. Louis / August 31, 2009 11:43 AM
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With the hopes of expanding our coverage and giving our subscribers as much unprecendented access as possible this season, we are trying several new ideas. This series is an opportunity for you to get to know the boys from North Oldham High School and to experience their season in a new and different way. Hopefully, you will see the kind of program that they have put together is special, not only because of the results, but because of what they have done to get where they are now.
Things are different here
The area is scenic and quiet as you drive through Prospect, Kentucky on your way to Goshen. US-42 takes you there and is surrounded by dense trees for most of the ride towards your destination. There are impressive houses and condos scattered along the way as well which help you understand that this is no low income area that you might find in many of the populated areas in Kentucky. You will pass Goshen Elementary, a host of Montessori schools, Harmony Elementary, North Oldham High School and North Oldham Middle School all on your trip to practice. There is still construction happening near the high school as building projects have been happening throughout the past year to complete additions the middle and high school. The high school track was redone just last year and sits within walking distance of the high school, middle school, and Harmony Elementary. The entire community feels so close together in this part of Kentucky, even if it isn’t necessarily that way at all geographically.
Oldham County is just situated just northeast of Louisville, Kentucky and would be defined as a surburban area next to Louisville. It is perceived as a very high-income area of the state, and it is in many parts, but it would be foolish to believe that every student and athlete attending school in this district has cash to spare. Due to the high per capita number in the county, the expectations academically are higher and the performance of the schools in the past is aligned with that. Based on academic data and enrollment data, US News and World Report considered North Oldham, which enrolls roughly 900 students, among the top seven public high schools in the entire state of Kentucky in 2008. Clearly, the mindset towards academics encourages the students to set their goals high and enables them to achieve great things.
About half of a mile past the middle school and high school, you make a sharp right hand turn to enter the team’s practice area. Seeing it for the first time makes it appear as if it is a wooded paradise, with tree-sheltered dirt trails that wind through thick woods providing a safe haven for these runners. Their training ground is the Creasey-Mahan Nature Preserve in Goshen, Kentucky and it is no small area. From the nature preserve’s website, “Creasey Mahan Nature Preserve is a 168-acre non-profit nature preserve,” and, “includes forested areas and grasslands with eight miles of trails, spring-fed creeks, a frog pond, waterfalls, and picnic areas.” When you look for signs that a program can be successful, having quality practice areas is a big deal. Beyond that, the team is within driving distance of E.P. Tom Sawyer State Park, which is where they practice on most Wednesdays after school. The course is home to a handful of large high school and college invitationals and has hosted both regional and national championships for college cross-country teams in the past. The relatively flat park has little shelter in comparison, but has long, grassy straightaways and some short loops that are very conducive to interval work, which is what most of the work the team does there.
Now, when I came to practice at North Oldham for the first time it looked the same as any other place. There were about 24 high school boys sitting around a picnic table, jump-kicking a tree, and swinging on a swingset nearby. They were all waiting for coach Drew LaMaster to show up to so they could begin practice and were parusing an old high school yearbook that had a classic shot of Coach LaMaster. When Drew showed up, the guys started harassing him about the yearbook and joking with him about the other students pictured there. There are no impressive looking young men with very broad shoulders or rippling muscles that allow you to think that they have some great athletic ability. Instead, you see a group of mostly skinny and lanky boys who have gathered here for some reason and could be up to just about anything. In talking with assistant coach, Matt Weingardt, you get the sense of how young the team is and how exciting that may be for the group. “Yesterday, (Wednesday, August 19th) the boys did a two-mile time trial and seven of the top eleven guys were sophomores.” Now, that says a good bit about the teams’ youth, but it doesn’t quite give you the feeling that this group is going to be dominant now. In order to do that, you have to go back two years and talk about where they came from. Coach Drew LaMaster states, “When I first became head coach, the biggest lessons I had to teach were competing and getting out of the ‘comfort zone’.”
Kentucky’s postseason consists of a regional meet and then the state meet. We have three classes based on school size: Class A, Class AA, and Class AAA, and North Oldham falls into the middle group in Class AA. At the regional, the number of teams that advance to the state finals is directly related to the number of teams of five that show up on the starting line, but the specifics of that aspect aren’t vital here. On November 3rd, 2007, North Oldham hosted Class AA Region 3 on their home course in Goshen. They put their top five athletes in the top nine and six in the top fifteen to dominate the team race. The times weren’t incredible on paper as their top five were between 17:39 and 18:04, but with a tight pack like that, and an expected improvement at the state meet, this team looked like it was going to be in the mix for a top three finish. Their first runner, Cas Lane, and their seventh runner, Matt Dearmond, were both seniors, but none of the other athletes that ran that day were even juniors as Justin Roenigk and Sean O’Nan were sophomores and the trio of Colin Grandon, Nathan Yates, and Jeremy Rice were all freshmen. That being said, it appeared that the time was now for this group to start a run that would become very memorable.
The weather was awkwardly warm at the state meet that year. It was surprising to run a meet the second weekend in November and have temperatures above sixty degrees, but that’s just how things work sometimes. Due to the weather being so nice, times were much better than people had expected coming in and the final results changed significantly based on that. Things looked pretty good early for the North Oldham group, as they dropped their top three runners, Roenigk, Grandon, and Lane, into slots 20, 29, and 31 overall and if things played out similar to their regional, the next two scorers would have been just a bit behind them to finish off a great team showing. It wasn’t to be, though, as Sean O’Nan came through in 68th place and Jeremy Rice followed as the team’s 5th runner in 94th place overall. If their top five would have each just finished in the top 50 overall, they would have easily claimed third place and set the stage for things to come. LaMaster and company were devasted. “It was a great time to learn a lesson on humility. The guys learned that you just can’t show up, you have to take it to the next level at state.” Instead, they left the meet wondering what had happened and wondering what was next for them. “I told the guys after the race to remember how dissappointed they felt. I told them to remember and never make themselves have to feel that way again.”
Fast forward a year, and the stage was set for an eerily similar finale to the 2008 cross-country season. 2008 was a realignment year for the cross-country classes and it affected North Oldham’s regional significantly as several solid teams moved into their regional and several not-so-consistent teams moved out. The course for the regional changed, but there wasn’t any kind of expectation for the outcome to change from the year before. North Oldham returned Grandon, Roenigk, Rice, Yates, and O’Nan from last year’s team (that finished 7th in the final results), so naturally the group was expected to have success, but some things changed over that year and expectations were raised. The addition of freshman Taylor Sanders, who placed fourth at the middle school state meet in 2007 as an 8th grader, created a front-runner for the group that had never had one previously. Things also changed, as Rice and O’Nan didn’t even compete at the regional due to injuries, giving way to a senior, Taylor Horn, and some more young blood in freshmen Ryan Kalmey and Andy Powers. LaMaster stated, “Having Taylor Horn and Andy Powers come on strong at the end of the year really showed our depth, despite how young our team was. It gave us flexibility when we needed it most.”
This time around, the group placed 2nd, 4th and 5th overall at the regional with Sanders, Grandon, and Roenigk, but there was a significant gap to the rest of the team in terms of time. While the entire group of seven finished in the first 19 runners overall, there was a 43-second gap between their third and fourth runners at the regional and that is enough to give hope to plenty of teams. They won easily over second place South Oldham and third place Christian Academy (Louisville), two teams that were expected to step up and compete with North Oldham for the state title, but it wasn’t enough in many people’s minds to warrant a unanimous decision that North Oldham was the best Class AA team in the state with one week left in the season. Especially after last season’s regional showing led to a bit of a collapse at the state meet, there was reason to believe it might happen again.
The 2008 cross-country state meet was totally different from 2007, as heavy rain and cold descended on the Kentucky Horse Park course the morning of the championships. Temperatures were hovering close to 40 degrees and the sloppy course just added to the issues the runners were facing. Two other teams, brought in front-running groups against North Oldham as Calloway County brought a group of three runners that had run near the front of about every race they had competed in that year, as did West Jessamine. Looking back, Coach LaMaster said, “We knew our front three guys had to beat everyone else’s three for us to have a chance to win.” Calloway’s top three runners placed 9th, 21st, and 29th in the team scoring, setting them up for a shot at the title in their minds. West Jessamine showed even better with 5th, 16th, and 23rd for their top three runners, so this would be no ‘walk in the park’ for North Oldham, or so it seemed.
North Oldham started out with a huge fourth place finish from fantastic freshmen Taylor Sanders. Roenigk and Grandon stepped up in a big way, running together for the whole of the race and ending up 11th and 14th overall. Their lead through three runners looked great, but they needed some big finishes to seal the deal. Ryan Kalmey, also a freshman, answered the call, finishing 38th overall, giving the group a team score of just 45 points through four runners and a boost of confidence coming into the last scorer. As they kept watching, though, they watched as six Calloway runners came across the line. West Jessamine’s fourth wasn’t too far behind their fourth, and South Oldham was shoving runners across the line quickly. Could it happen again? Was this team going to leave empty-handed again after everything they had gone through last year?
Sophomore Nathan Yates had the answer. He crossed the line 80th overall, 63rd in the team scores, and then the group had to wait. It was easy to think that they had done enough up front to bring home the title, but that was a big gap from 4 to 5 and maybe, just maybe one of the other teams had made it happen. As they announced the results, there were just two points separating the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th teams. They were announced from 4th, West Jessamine, to 3rd, South Oldham, to 2nd, Calloway County, then, finally, North Oldham was announced as the team champion and claimed their title. “Our first four guys ran PR’s on the biggest stage of their careers. I was sweating bullets, though, on our 5th, 6th, and 7th runners, but they pulled it together just in time.” They had actually won quite easily, outdistancing Calloway by 32 points, but that didn’t matter at the time, as the incredible group of spectators, parents, and teammates exploded as this group finally realized their potential. “It was a special moment. The guys worked so hard all season. Our parents were avid supporters every week. I have never been more proud of a team in my life. As a coach, I will never forget the way it felt to see the joy on so many faces.”
Now, with just one senior departing from that state championship team, they return hungry for more….
