The famous phrase is about the loneliness of the long distance runner, but sprinters, hurdlers and pole vaulters tend to spend a lot of time alone as well, abiding in breath and pure tenacity as each hones his body into an instrument of competition.
But Saturday afternoon, the athletes from the Mira Costa High School Boys Track & Field team came very much together, pulling off a stunning collective victory that claimed the school its first ever CIF Southern Section championship.
The meet at Moorpark High School ran nearly eight hours. The Mustangs had projected to finish fifth. Early in the day, even this seemed unlikely. But as the points came in, the Mustangs began to climb.
“We were seventh, we were sixth,” head coach Moe Russell said, recounting the day. “And then midway through the meet, we were fifth.”
There was a glimmer of a thought as the climb continued, something nobody said out loud quite yet. But it was there: “Maybe we can win this thing.” Or as Russell put it as the team found itself in fifth with a lot of points still on the board: “Okay, cool.”
The 4×100 relay finished fifth shortly after noon. Senior Krish Desai ran 4:07.03 in the 1600 to take third — a time that would have won most years, except the Division 1 winner ran 4:04 and broke the CIF Southern Section record that afternoon. Junior Mateo Loo took fifth in the 110-meter hurdles in 14.64. Senior Caden Enright, who had entered the program four years earlier running a 59-second 400, was sixth in his individual 400 at 48.67. A.J. McBean was fourth in the 100 at 10.58. By mid-afternoon, junior Tomek Gorzkowski had cleared 15-11 in the pole vault to finish second; he already holds the school record at 16 ‘4″. Then senior Ryan Burger, who is signed to UC Riverside, won the 800 meters in 1:52.68 — the only individual CIF championship Mira Costa would claim on the day.
“And then two events later, we were third,” Russell said. “Okay.”
Then Loo took second in the 300-meter hurdles in 37.50, his second scoring event of the day. Coached by Kelvyn Gamble — whom Russell calls one of the top two hurdles coaches in California — Loo was now a multi-event difference-maker in the team math. Gorzkowski had earned his points by, among other things, being the kid who stays at practice long after it is technically over. “That’s why he was able to pull off his portion of how we won on Saturday,” Russell would say later.
“Around our 300 hurdles, or our 4×8 guys going, we were second,” Russell said.
The 4×800 relay placed fourth shortly after Carson Ehman ran 9:02.17 to finish fourth in the 3,200.
“And we still had three events to go with three athletes — three opportunities to still score points,” Russell said.
By the time the final event of the day arrived — the boys’ 4×400-meter relay — Mira Costa held a slim lead and a clear calculation: a top-six finish would clinch it.
“We controlled our destiny,” Russell said.
There was, however, a long and painful wait before that destiny could be made manifest. The 4×400 is run by division, and Division 1 ran last. Eight prior relays had to finish before Mira Costa’s runners would even step to the line. The Mustang team — distance runners, sprinters, hurdlers, vaulters, parents, coaches — sat together in the stands and watched, and waited.
“Nobody was talking,” said Hunter Johnson, the boys’ distance coach. “We’re just sitting in the stands, everybody’s frozen still, waiting.”
When Mira Costa’s relay finally began, the day’s slow climb threatened to come undone. Senior Luke Leonard — son of a Costa track alum from the 1980s, and one of the team’s school-record-holding sprinters — handed off the opening leg on pace. But Emiliano Perez, on the second leg, ran into a field stacked with sub-49-second 400-meter specialists. Even though he ran a strong 51-second 400, by the time the baton reached the third leg, Mira Costa was in ninth place.
The third leg belonged to Loo, who had already scored points twice that day. He took the baton in last and didn’t look like he ever slowed down.
“By the time he got around the first turn, he caught three guys,” Russell said. “And by the time he got to the 200-meter mark, he had already caught another guy. So we went from ninth to fifth on his leg alone.”
Loo handed off to Enright, the senior anchor — the kid who had run 59 as a freshman, who hadn’t gotten out of CIF prelims in the 400 the previous year, and who was now finishing the closest race of his Mira Costa career. Enright held the position, caught one more runner, and brought it home in fifth.
Loo and Enright split 47-second 400s — a number that puts them in elite company among California high school relay runners.
“That’s the one that brought it home,” Russell said.
The Mustangs’ time was 3:16.93. As the official scoring came in, the stands erupted.
“It was like this explosion of excitement,” Johnson said. “We were just jumping and going crazy. And we don’t always get that in track. Track is very, like, you win and you try to act very humble. But that was a moment where we let our emotions fully out. We got to jump around and scream and cry and all that stuff.”
The crying part was not metaphorical. Standing in the infield as his athletes celebrated was Russell, a man who has spent more of his life on the Mira Costa track than not.
“Coach Mo has been here over 25 years,” Johnson said. “He pretty much graduated from Costa and started coaching. He’s put his heart and soul into this program. This is really his baby, and it was a special moment for him. We may have gotten some tears out of him on Saturday.”
“My eyes were sweating,” Russell said. “They were sweating.”
“He’s a big guy,” Johnson said. “He looks like a big, grizzly, mean guy, but he’s actually a big softy.”
A Class of 1996 graduate of Mira Costa, Russell ran sprints as a Mustang and, until two years ago, held the school’s freshman and sophomore 100-meter records. (“In my mind I still got them,” he said.) He began coaching at his alma mater the year after he graduated, in 1997, when the sprint coach at the time left for West Torrance and asked Russell — then a 19-year-old hoping for a football career at El Camino College — to take over the event group. The football career didn’t pan out. The coaching stuck.
This is Russell’s 29th year at Mira Costa. Over that time, he has watched the program grow from roughly 140 athletes to over 200. He has built a staff of 14 coaches around him — most of whom he hires and then, by his deputies’ accounts, lets them do their work without micromanaging. Several have been with him for decades. Renee Williams-Smith, who coaches the girls program, was on staff during Russell’s early coaching years. Steve Singiser, a former head coach, is still the program’s announcer and institutional memory. Murray Mead, the pole vault coach, still competes in masters meets himself.
“The beautiful part about it for me is a lot of the coaches that were on staff when I was an athlete, I’m still fortunate to still have them,” Russell said. “A lot of our coaching staff has been around this whole time, so to be able to accomplish what we were able to accomplish is really meaningful.”
What they accomplished Saturday is something none of them had ever done. The Mira Costa boys track and field program has existed for the entire history of the school. It had never won a CIF Southern Section championship. Until last weekend, boys track was conspicuously absent from the long list of sports the school has won CIF titles in — football, basketball, water polo, soccer, tennis, both volleyballs, wrestling, both cross countries, and now both lacrosses.
The arc of Russell’s three decades runs straight into that absence. Saturday, it ended.
“It was just — did this really happen? Did this just happen?” Russell said of the moment after the 4×400 crossed the finish line. “It was an electric moment for the program, not just for those guys and girls in that moment, but for just our whole history.”
He reached out to former coaches after the meet. “A little emotional,” he said. “But yeah, it was awesome.”
The Mustangs scored 62 points to edge Loyola, the perennial Catholic-school powerhouse, by four. Long Beach Poly, the defending Division 1 champion, finished third with 54. The depth was the difference. Mira Costa won the meet without the kind of multi-event star who anchors most championship teams. The Mustangs scored points in every running event except one.
“That is unheard of for us,” Russell said. “We normally have, you know, athletes — maybe a hurdler, maybe a vaulter, maybe a sprinter. Last year at this meet, we finished fifth or sixth, and we lost some good seniors who are still competing at the next level right now. To come back and do it without them, and actually win it, speaks volumes about the guys who stepped up that afternoon.”
The Mustangs’ season now rolls forward into the CIF-SS Masters Meet, where the top finishers across all four divisions race for state qualifying positions. Johnson said that every Mira Costa athlete who competed at CIF finals Saturday qualified for Masters — a first, he believes, in program history.
Asked what was going through his mind during those final two legs of the 4×400, with 29 years of program history in the balance and the Mustangs sitting in ninth place with the baton, Russell didn’t talk about himself. He talked about the athletes.
“Everything that it took to make that moment happen, from the athletes’ perspective,” he said. “We ask a lot of athletes to do what we ask them to do, and hope they buy in, and they believe, and they understand that everything is for their benefit. We want them to be great. We want them to achieve every goal they have in their mind, and more. So when this moment happened — it worked, because it was a team effort. Tomek, for example, did what he needed to do, and it worked out. And it doesn’t happen unless he shows up to practice every day and does what his coach asks him to do. And when his friends are going out, he likes to stay and get some extra reps — that’s why he was able to pull off his portion of how we won on Saturday. And same thing for the other guys, and their examples. So it was just everything. The hard work paid off. And there was the proof — it can be done.”
