Douglas High School cross country coach David Bond begins his 27th year as head coach with one of his smallest teams since he’s been coaching.
 Bruce Whetten / Douglas Dispatch The Douglas High School cross country team was out running last week. Coach David Bond says overall participation numbers are down and he is currently looking for more runners. Douglas’ season begins Sept. 5 at the Sue Fletcher Invitational at Buena. |
“We have only about eight boys and eight girls,” he said. ‘We have some good runners but we’d certainly like some more.”
The DHS runners kick off their season Sept. 5 at the Buena Sue Fletcher Invitational. The home opener is Sept. 16 when the Bulldogs and Lady Bulldogs host Nogales and Rincon in a triangular meet.
The Sept. 16 meet will be Douglas’ lone home meet this year. DHS athletic director Randy Walker is hoping to add one more home meet but is unsure of when and who it will be against.
Bond did his usual summer running and took six of his runners to Pinetop for some additional running.
One of his runners, sophomore Micah Montes took it upon herself to compete in the teenager division of The North Face Canadian Death Race which was held earlier this month in Grande Cache, Alberta, Canada.
Montes said 260 runners took part in the race which was comprised of different age groups. She finished 12th out of 31 runners in her 13-15 year old age group and 38th place overall posting a time of 36:36.38 on the 3.1 mile course.
“I enjoyed it,” she said. “It was definitely harder than I expected. … The course was very hilly and the atmosphere was different.”
Montes said she got to meet North Face sponsored athlete Diane Van Deren who is really an amazing person and also Tracy Garneau who is also an amazing athlete.
“Tracy took Micah running and gave her some great tips,” said her mom April, whose boss is also the race director. “We had a really great time.”
The DHS runner admits she could have done better had she trained a little harder.
“Being my first time I was pleased,” she said. “I now have something to build on as far as my time.”
Montes says this has helped her get in better condition and after running the course in Alberta she will never complain about the Douglas course again.
Montes hopes to return to Canada again next year and compete in a different facet of the race.
In an effort to help build confidence in his runners Coach Bond has changed his training regime this year and now has a 42 minute training system set up where his runners run as far as they can in that allotted time.
With this new system Coach Bond says some of his runners have been doing very well.
‘This is putting more emphasis on their self motivation,” he said. “Before I would tell them they had to run a certain distance in a time and they wouldn’t do it and we had a failure situation. This way they run as far as they can and hopefully we see improvement each week.”
The coach said this particular schedule is done two to three times per week.
“It’s listed and posted and this way they are competing against themselves,” Bond said. “Then we also see how many 200’s they can do in 42 minutes. That also seems to be working out really well.”
Bond says he has a good group of runners this year that seem to be very enthusiastic.
On the boys team seniors Luis Martinez, Alek Irey are expected to lead the Bulldogs this year with sophomore Alfonso Mejia.
“All three of those kids did summer running for us,” the coach said. “Mejia did more work than any of our other runners.”
Junior Kenny Cardenas and freshman Ricky Larez round out the top five for the boys team.
On the girls side Coach Bond has two sets of sisters in Kristi and Kim Cormier and Melia and Leilani Skinner to lead his team with Montes, Natalie Ramirez and Kayla Fields challenging for that fifth spot.
The coach says once again his team is in a very tough region with Rio Rico and Catalina, two of the top running programs in the entire state, both back again for the next two years in the same region as Douglas.
“They’re always very good and they’re as good as any of the top two teams in any region,” he said. “We’re trying to hang on to that third spot in order for us to go to state.”
Bond said his runners could challenge Rio Rico and Catalina but its going to take some serious commitment from his runners.
“This is a full-time job now,” he said. “They will have to do some serious summer running.”
Bond says his coaching can make them a good team but if they want to be an individual state champion they will have to do a lot of running in both the summer and winter putting in anywhere between 10-16 miles per day.
Coach Bond has retired from teaching but says he is not ready to give up coaching.
“I really enjoy cross country,” he said. “It’s a good sport, very simple. They just run 3.1 miles. As a coach its pretty simple we don’t have to worry about whose on second or what we’re going to do in a third and long situation. We just focus on making them fast three mile runners. … This is probably the healthiest sport there is to run. ”
Bond said anyone interested in coming out for cross country may contact him or his assistant coach Manny Ramirez.
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