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the road to Portland - Teams all over the US are striving for an invitation to the 2nd Nike Team Nationals in Portland OR December 3, 2005. DyeStat looks in on some of these teams to describe the quest.
Unfinished Business -
Oakton VA girls pick up where they left off last year
Oakton girls are training hard to prevent last year's state meet "disaster" that cost them an invitation to the inaugural NTN. They have an Olympic training partner (Alan Webb) because Oakton coach Scott Raczko still coaches his former high school star. Raczko juggles world travel for Webb with responsibilities to the Oakton girls because he still loves coaching high school. Raczko doesn't like the girls to think about NTN yet because "It's still early," but he thinks the team will be very strong by the end of the season.
Oakton's varsity team and coach Scott Raczko
by Ben Ackerly
Southeast Regional editor
CENTREVILLE, VA 10/13/05 – “It’s still early.” Spend any time around the Oakton cross-country team and these are three words you’ll hear a lot. Particularly now, mid-season, a time when it’s easy to think that the leaders up front are up front to stay. It’s still early. Oakton knows.
This time last year, the girls of Oakton VA were the darlings of the Southeast Region, a talented young team with a hot new coach and fresh off a breakthrough performance at Great American. The #1 ranking in the region would soon follow, as would program-first district and regional titles. In the region meet, Oakton put four runners in the top seven of a strong 15-team field that included perennial power Lake Braddock VA, then the 9 th-ranked team in the Southeast. A first-ever state championship – and a trip to the inaugural Nike Team Nationals in Portland, Oregon – seemed like a sure thing.
But something unexpected happened on the hills of Great Meadow, site of the Virginia state meet. Oakton fell apart, finishing 4 th in a 3A race won by Lake Braddock – 52 points behind a team the Cougars had beaten by 31 in regionals just nine days before.
“It was a disaster,” says Oakton Coach Scott Raczko.
Flying Coach
Watching Raczko in action at the recent Glory Days Grill Invitational in northern Virginia, a meet held two days later than originally scheduled due to extensive flooding in Bull Run Regional Park, he seems like a typical high school coach: part mentor and counselor, part cheerleader, part tormented dreamer, part parent and part boss. Out on the race course his voice is one of the loudest – “Go Oakton!” One gets the impression that nothing in the world matters more.
So it’s easy to forget that Raczko is also the coach of Alan Webb, and if not for all the airplanes landing at nearby Dulles Airport, you might not think of it at all. “I hate to fly,” Raczko says, eyeing another passing jumbo jet arriving from who-knows-where. “I hate it!” Which is tough when you consider all the flying Raczko has to do – six trips to Europe and 100,000-plus air miles in 2005 alone. “There’s nothing I like about flying,” he goes on. “But you have to do it.”
Raczko has to do it because of his commitment to a small stable of elite runners, a group that includes 2003 American University graduate Samia Akbar, an All-American at 10,000 meters, and northern Virginia native and recent Wake Forest grad Nikeya Green, a 2004 Olympic Trials qualifier at 800 meters. But it is Webb who’s had Raczko crisscrossing the globe.
Webb, of course, has been the “It boy” of U.S. track and field since he shattered Jim Ryun’s prep mile record in 2001 while at South Lakes High School in Reston, VA. Raczko, then in his late 20s (he’s 33 now), took over at South Lakes Webb’s sophomore year and quickly formed a tight bond with his young prodigy. When Webb turned pro, after a frustrating freshman year of injuries and setbacks at the University of Michigan, it was to Raczko he returned, and many thought Raczko’s days of coaching prep runners might be over. Raczko himself wondered the same thing, but only very briefly.
“I didn’t miss a day of high school coaching,” says Raczko, who did, however, to lighten his administrative responsibilities, soon leave South Lakes to work with two former colleagues at nearby Oakton.
“I just realized, hey, I’m a high school coach. I love coaching high school kids, and I want to keep doing it.”
Not that there hasn’t been the occasional conflict. Raczko missed last spring’s state outdoor meet to be with Webb at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Oregon. At Great American last month, Raczko was with the team for a course inspection and dinner the night before, but on race day itself he was in New York for Webb’s run in the Fifth Avenue Mile. “The team understands,” Raczko says. In fact, they hardly seem to notice. “Unless Alan is working out with us, we don’t even think about it,” says senior Kayley Byrne, Oakton’s top runner. “I feel like we’re his main focus. He’s always there.”
Teammate Meredith Tighe’s assessment: “I think it’s cool.”
Raczko’s elite runners and the Oakton team train together about once a week. And while volume and intensity are greatly reduced for the high school athletes, the coaching philosophy – a progressive strength-focused system Raczko says “evolves all the time” – is the same for both groups.
“Obviously the mentality is a lot different,” Raczko says, comparing his elite and prep runners, “but they’re all trying to be the best that they can be.”
One Bad Race
Return to November of 2004, and Raczko, fresh off his first Olympics with Webb, in his first year guiding the girls cross-country program at Oakton, has the Lady Cougars on the brink of a first state title in school history.
“We had such a successful season,” Raczko says. “I really think the girls deserved to win states.”
Instead, events and inexperience conspired against the Cougars. Allegra Smith, the team’s #3 runner and one of two seniors in the top seven, came down with mononucleosis soon after the region win and was in poor condition by states. Smith finished 7 th for the team at Great Meadow, but Raczko believes even more harm was done in the days before the race, as the girls – all but two of whom would be competing in the state meet for the first time – came to realize they would not have one of their leaders at full strength.
“It killed their mindset,” Raczko says. “They ran in such a pack last year. When Allegra got sick … The pack disintegrated right at the gun.”
Byrne, who paced the team up front that day and finished 10 th overall, says only, “We can’t explain it.”
Poor weather that closed Great Meadow the day before the race didn’t help either. “We never got on the course – that was a huge mistake,” Raczko says.
“They just got way out of the comfort zone they were used to.”
It was a discouraging way to end what up to that point had been such a dominant season. Raczko, coaching since he was 20 and who with Webb has experienced his share of ups and downs, passed on what he knew. “I told them one race does not take away from the great season they had and that if they remain focused that there will be another opportunity.”
“It is important for athletes to have a long-term vision,” Raczko adds, “and know that if they are focused and work hard, that good things will occur.”
Which is not to suggest he ever worried very seriously about his team’s mental health. “I knew they would bounce back,” Raczko says. “That is the character they have.”
It’s Still Early
Oakton’s 2005 season began where the last one ended, at Great Meadow, thus ensuring there will be no running the state meet blind two years in a row. Though the Cougars, who entered the season at #3 in the regional rankings, finished third behind state rivals Midlothian and Brentsville in that meet (the Great Meadows Invitational), Raczko sounded a familiar refrain in the immediate aftermath. "It was a good early-season race for the team,” he said then. “It's early, and I feel that this team will continue to get stronger as the season goes on, as the team gains experience and continues its hard work. The state meet is two months away, and obviously that is the focus."
Two weeks later, Oakton finished sixth at Great American, third from the region behind Episcopal FL and Brentsville. It was not the dazzling performance that had so surprised and impressed observers the year before – in the 2004 event, when no other team from the Southeast Region cracked the top 10 in the Race of Champions, an unranked Oakton finished fourth – but it wasn’t the end of the season either. Raczko at the time called the performance simply “another step in our journey to a successful end of the season.”
 Now its mid-October and Oakton is filling in nicely behind Byrne up front. At the rain-delayed Glory Days meet, the Cougars, going without usual top-5 runner Carly Hudson, put four runners in the top 11 overall and won by 46 points in an 18-team field.
“It’s still early, but it went really well,” Byrne says after the race. “This is the first meet where the pack has stayed together. Our pack is where all our energy comes from.”
Raczko for his part seemed most impressed by the challenging course conditions at Bull Run Regional Park – soft and spongy footing with ankle-deep mud in sections (left). “This will help us later,” he says.
But later is getting sooner for a team back near the top of the regional rankings. And with his team in good position to possibly run the table at districts, regionals and states, does a December trip to Portland enter into his discussions with the team?
“We’ve never talked about Nike Team Nationals,” Raczko says. “Not once. We just don’t talk about it.”
And neither do the girls amongst themselves. “We haven’t talked at all about Oregon,” says Byrne.
Later, Raczko allows, “If the team is fortunate enough to be ranked high enough to go to NTN, I think it’s a phenomenal opportunity. But we can’t get ahead of ourselves. We have to take care of business. I’m confident that if we run as well as we can through the rest of the season that we will be worthy of consideration for [NTN], and if we’re selected it will be a great opportunity. It would have been a great opportunity last year . . .”
As always, all attention is on states. Eight of Oakton’s top 10 runners were part of that loss last November; not one of them is going to forget. “I think we are out to prove something this year,” says Tighe, a junior who ran #3 for Oakton in last year’s state meet. “We want to show who we are and what we could have done.”
After a long afternoon at Bull Run, Raczko meets with the entire team and then huddles with his top girls. Despite the strong showing, there is no sense of satisfaction in the air, only the steady flow of airplanes overhead. And there is no variation on the theme. “It’s still early,” Raczko says. “Our emphasis this year is to get it done at states. That’s what it’s all about.”
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