In two short years, Liberty North has become a targeted team on the cross country course.
Both the boys and girls teams have exploded onto the running landscape this year. As a new school that opened in the fall of 2010, Liberty North has quickly built a program made up of both front-runners and depth. Even though the progression has been quick, it didn’t happen overnight.
Head coach Dave Chatlos walked into the first day of practice last year and found only one runner with any real experience in Max Jobson, who had been a varsity runner as a sophomore the previous season for Liberty.
“The first day ever at Liberty North, as far as I know, there was only one kid that had run for more than 40 minutes, and that was Max,” Chatlos said. “We really started from scratch.”
Now the Eagles are not only competing, they are winning.
At the always-loaded Rim Rock meet, Sammy Laurenzo and Jobson each won individual titles in the Blue Division. As a team, the girls won by nearly 100 points over district foe Smithville, 62 to 160. The boys took fifth behind two out-of-state schools and district competitors Kearney and Smithville. Both teams followed that with victories at the Excelsior Springs Invitational, marking the first first-place trophy for the boys.
Chatlos said he is aware the progression has been rapid, but he has seen what his runners have done to get there.
“It wasn’t rocket science,” Chatlos said. “We just run a lot, run often.”
With nearly 30 combined boys and girls looking for direction last fall, Chatlos outlined a running program that would mirror that of Liberty’s. That’s what Chatlos knew first-hand, and he knew it worked.
Chatlos ran for Tim Nixon at Liberty and graduated in 1997. He was also influenced by Robert Marquardt, who coaches the varsity at Liberty. Chatlos saw the difference an off-season program could make. He was present when Nixon began to formulate a regiment similar to the one used by coach Joe Bill Dixon at West Plains.
“I got to see life without summer mileage and with summer mileage,” Chatlos said.
In fact, Chatlos’ final high school cross country season of 1996 was the last time Liberty failed to qualify a team for the state meet. After graduating from William-Jewell in 2002, Chatlos began working as a substitute at Liberty and volunteered with the track team. Soon he was hired as a full-time teacher, and Chatlos spent eight years working with the Liberty track and cross country teams before the district opted to create a second school.
Chatlos viewed the new school, Liberty North, as his chance to try to create a program on his own.
Using lessons learned from Nixon and Marquardt at Liberty and from Dixon’s summer camp, Chatlos modeled his program in a similar fashion. The first objective was to get his runners to commit to putting in the necessary mileage. Nearly the entire cross country and track seasons last year were about teaching the kids how to run and putting in miles in bunches.
“The first eight to 10 weeks were spent just learning to run,” Chatlos said. “It took a long time until we were ready to start training.”
The kids started with 20-minute to 30-minute runs a day. Slowly Chatlos added five minutes, then another five and another five.
Luckily for Chatlos he had that one runner who did have experience. Jobson proved a valuable ally as Chatlos tried to get his message across. Jobson was nervous and scared about starting out at a new school. Out of nearly 100 runners at Liberty, Jobson was the only one who landed on the other side of the new dividing line.
“I wasn’t looking forward to the move because I was on a team where everyone knew each other,” Jobson said. “But I found a way to make it work. Instead of being in the back of the pack, I had to run in the front of the pack and have people look up to me.”
Jobson became the Eagles’ unofficial Wikipedia. Any question that came up, Jobson had to have an answer. He was the link between the new runners and their new coach. He directed his teammates on when to cool down, when to stretch, how to stretch, what to eat, when to rest, etc.
“They certainly had a lot of questions; they weren’t sure what to do,” Jobson said. “I felt like an assistant coach. A lot of them really followed my example, and I really like that.”
“I feel like I became more of a runner. I have a better look at the life of runner. I was a little scared to do (the move), but now I’m glad I did it.”
Sophomore Ty Hughes is the epitome of the progress the Eagles have made. Hughes has made tremendous strides since he showing up for the first practice last fall when he couldn’t run more than a mile without walking. Now Hughes is the team’s No. 2 and posted a PR of 17:13 at Rim Rock.
“That’s a really big success story of someone who’s been consistent and worked hard,” Chatlos said.
Chatlos isn’t alone in his mission to develop the Eagles into better runners. He said the entire school is dedicated to improving every student athlete. Athletics director Bob Kernell set up the Eagle Athletic Development program which has every coach invested in the training and conditioning of all the athletes.
“All the head coaches there believe in creating athletes, not just sport specific, and all the coaches bought into this,” Chatlos said. “I’ve seen the head football coach recruiting for me. The faculty is so good at getting kids involved.”
Chatlos knows he has some talent, too. Laurenzo began posting solid times almost immediately as a freshman last year. She also bought into the system and works just like her teammates.
“She’s darn talented, but she’s put more into this last year than any girl I’ve seen in four years,” Chatlos said.
Freshman Stephanie Boan had experience running in middle school, and she latched onto the program right away. Boan has been pushing Laurenzo all season and has become a solid No. 2.
But it takes more than two runners to score team victories.
The Eagles were blessed with some added depth when Molly Hertz moved into the district from Wisconsin and slid into the No. 3 spot. Sophomore Yesenia Gomez has secured another varsity spot, as has juniors Melissa Stockwell and Selena Dunn.
Stockwell came to the sport as a freshman at Liberty following her older sister, Brittany, a 2010 Liberty graduate. Stockwell was clocking 28 minutes or more for 5k. She knew she had to put in some offseason work, but her summer job precluded her from running much before her sophomore season.
She was able to juggle her schedule this summer and found a way to log 770 miles, the second most behind Laurenzo. She also attended Joe Bill Dixon’s running camp with her teammates.
“We thought Chatlos was crazy because we had been running an ungodly amount of miles,” Stockwell said. “When we got to camp, Joe Bill was telling us exactly what coach Chatlos had been telling us all summer. It donned on us, he was telling us exactly what we needed to do to get better.”
Stockwell, who saw some marked improvement during last spring’s track season, has really taken off this fall. She ran a PR of 21:23 at Platte County this fall, and she has solidified herself as one of the scoring Eagles.
“She’s just a product of hard work and guts,” Chatlos said.
Over the last two years, Chatlos has convinced the Eagles to run in the offseason, to dedicate themselves to the weight room, to work to get better. Early successes served to motivate more work, which prodded more work and then more success.
But one ingredient was missing. He was developing sound runners, but they had not come together as a team. In fact, Stockwell said the long summer and hot weather had started to wear on the girls. They were growing irritable with each other. Chatlos called them all together, and they were able to agree on a common goal – to win as a team.
“We sat down and had a conversation about what wasn’t working,” Stockwell said. “We started working together like I’ve never seen a varsity team work together.”
For Chatlos, the teams’ successes have been a great boost in confidence and a better reward for all the runners have put into their training. But for him it still comes down to the little successes each week – each new PR that comes as direct result of everything that’s gone into the last two years.
“You can’t put a price on hard work paying off like that,” Chatlos said.