Running with the Wolves

By Terry Mosher

Editor, Sports Paper

It’s difficult even now to catch Ed Santos. As the athletic director for the South Kitsap School District he’s constantly running around, attending “nut and bolts” meetings, talking to head coaches, and doing all the other things, big and small, that make the state’s second largest high school’s athletic program run.

Running has been what Santos has done well over the years. He was either doing that or managing runners. Before he became AD, Santos was one of the state’s more successful cross-country coaches, coached track and field, and was running himself.

But you have to go deeper to realize running was not even an after-thought in his mind at one time. He was once just another high school student, destined for whatever. Then along came Jon Herrrington, physical education instructor and head cross country and track and field coach at Washington High School in the Parkland area near Tacoma.

Santos was a sophomore and a self-described nerdy kid at Washington when the running light came on. He was in Herrington’s PE class and Herrington was holding a track unit, timing kids through a 12-minute mile, and he saw something in Santos that Santos didn’t see in himself.

This was at a time (mid 1970s) when Herrington was just trying beginning to put together the cross-country program and was looking for possible recruits.

“I had to do something to get kids out,” says Herrington who lives in retirement in Sumner. “The kids weren’t really aware of our track program. So I started scoring the kids in class and wound up with some who I thought had potential, whether it was in the hurdles, discus or distance runs.”

Just by recognizing a particular kid and giving him/her praise was good enough. But some of them wanted more.

“They got to thinking, ‘Maybe I’m not too bad of a guy after all,’ ” Herrington said. “So they would come out, do some fun stuff and have fun.”

Then, of course, they would be hooked. That’s what happened to Santos. He started running and found he liked it and kept on running.

“He was with a group that was just before we got good,” says Herrington. “You teach a lot of people when you are a teacher and most of them go to class and go on and do other things in their life. A few you have an impact on their life, and Eddie turned out to be one of those kids.”

When Santos started with Herrington and the Washington cross country program, it wasn’t like he was a star. Far from it. But he enjoyed it and a fire had been lit that still burns today.

His junior year at Washington, Santos said, “I was one of those kids who was back in the varsity pack. Sometimes there was a battle for the last varsity spot. I was one of those guys.”

Santos remembers the team going to the Seaside, Ore., Marathon. Back then, the central theory was to run many miles and that would make you much better. That theory has been replaced by doing shorter and faster runs, and that makes you better.

In his senior cross-country year, Santos said he moved up to become the Washington Patriots number three runner. He also ran the mile and two-mile in track. He never could break the 10-minute mark in the two-mile, although he worked hard at it. His best in the mile was a 4:39.0.

“I was really committed to it,” says Santos. “I really loved the sport and running. I just did. It’s how I met my wife (Becky). She is a runner as well. She is the better runner in the family.”

Their paths crossed at Tacoma Community College, where Santos continued to improve. In fact, he says he had his best running year as a sophomore at TCC.

“We were one of the better CC teams in the state,” says Santos, who consistently finished high in conference races.

His collegiate running would stop at Tacoma CC, but Santos would continue to run while attending Western Washington in Bellingham.

“I had delved into the world of marathons and kept on running and kept on getting hurt,” says Santos with a laugh.

It was during this period that Santos started doing some youth coaching while studying toward his degree in physical education and getting a teacher’s certificate. He had long ago figured out he wanted to be a PE teacher (like Herrington) and become a coach. That was almost derailed, though, in his senior year.

A visiting professor from Cal State Los Angeles tried to convince Santos to switch from becoming a PE teacher to be an instructor in the study of exercise.

“She thought I had some talent in that area,” says Santos.

After weighing all the factors, Santos decided to stick with teaching and coaching. He was pretty passionate about that. “It really was what I wanted to do,” he said.

He spent a year student teaching in Bellingham and in 1983 came to the South Kitsap School District as a PE teacher at East Port Orchard Elementary.

And he kept running.

“We ran a whole bunch of different road races,” Santos says. “We actually won the co-ed division of the Baff Jasper (Relay) in Alberta one year.

“I was an okay runner, a hard-working kind of blue-collar guy. I didn’t have great foot speed and technically I wasn’t really very good. Probably my two big biggest assets were work ethic and toughness.”

Santos laughs at his own words. In a sense, he adds, he was a grinder who loved to run, and while not the best he hung in there, gutted it out and finished whatever tough race was in front of him.

And it wasn’t like it wasn’t fun. It was.

“I had a lot of fun running those road races,” he says.

Santos qualified for the Boston Marathon in 1988 by running the Portland Marathon in 2:53.55, so it wasn’t like he was a Clydesdale.

A lot of the same qualities he brought to running he transferred to his coaching. There was the toughness, the good work ethic, and never-say-never, grind it out and never quit personality.

From Herrington and others he learned to make running fun for those students he coached. Plus, Santos brought his own attitude of being positive, up beat and full of enthusiasm to the coaching ranks.

Throw all those characteristics into a large coaching bowl and you have the makings of a successful coach. And that is what Santos was to become. He started helping out Lloyd Pugh, then the track and field and cross country coach at South Kitsap (now he’s at Bremerton as head track and field coach) in the mid-1980s and gradually worked his way up to become head coach of both programs at SK.

“He and I are sort of distance-runner soul mates,” says Pugh. “We both had done serious distance running, and we have a strong bond though that. And when he came in (to coach), he just had this enthusiasm, was eager and hard working and knowledgeable. That really came through when he was head cross-country coach. His enthusiasm, his knowledge and energy and ability to get through to the kids and inspire them, that was very important.”

South Kitsap has a history of producing good track and field and cross-country teams. So it wasn’t a surprise when they won under the coaching of Santos. But he did bring a different quality to the programs. – that upbeat, positive attitude that no matter how bad things are there are good things to talk about.

That quality he may have gotten from Herrington, who first of all says the majority of cross-country runners are introspective types.

“It’s because, I think, you are going out and running by yourself,” says Herrington, who also says, only half-kidding, that it also fosters adults who turn into spies. “I’ve had two kids who went into the spy work, for the CIA. They are jumping out of planes at 70,000 feet, free falling and then they pull out parachutes and are going into other countries.”

In fact, Santos’ younger brother Allen, who became a good runner for Herrington at Washington, has made the FBI his career.

But beyond turning out spymasters, Herrington said that you could always find the good in running. When he was starting up his program at Washington, his kids couldn’t compete with most other schools on an equal basis so he would find small victories for them to keep things positive and upbeat.

“You figure out ways to make success out of what you had,” Herrington says. “If you do the best job you can do then that is success.”

In other words, don’t measure yourself against somebody who should be better than you. Measure yourself by your own improvement. It’s the glass half-full theory, which is the way Santos views life, and is the way he coached.

And Santos may have picked up another thing from Herrington: the ability to make running fun. Herrington would find way to change things up so running would be interesting at the same time it was challenging.

“We challenged our girls volleyball team to some matches,” Herrington said with a laugh. “We would play flag football games. We had some blackberry patches between us and Pacific Lutheran (University) and one day we went out and ran and on the way back stopped and picked blackberries. We took them home and made blackberry pies and then the next day we had blackberry pies for practice.”

He would also invited the alumni back to run and afterwards they would go to Sprinkler Recreation Center at Spanaway and have a picnic with hot dogs. All of that would be filmed and shown later to the team as fun entertainment.

Santos would do similar things.

“We did all kind of fun things to motivate kids to turn out” Santos said. “When I started coaching cross country it wasn’t that big here. We didn’t have a lot of kids. So we would play games like Ultimate Frisbee and Capture the Flag and have donut runs, Popsicle runs, scavenger hunts runs.”

Eventually, Santos would welcome up to 70 kids out for cross-country. And the fun was mixed in with hard training. In fact, Santos had his cross-country teams meeting three or four times a week during summers, and going to camps. So it wasn’t all Popsicles and donuts, although fun was built into the program to keep it interesting.

It all paid off. His girls cross country teams went to state 16 straight years and his boy’s teams made state 13 of 16 years.

His 1997 team won the state girls cross country title and the following two years the Wolves finished third. That earned the team enough of a reputation the Wolves were invited as one of the top 25 teams in the country to the Great American Cross Country Festival in Charlotte, N.C. in 2000. The Wolves finished 15th, but just being there was a highlight of the kids’ life

Santos also took teams to San Francisco (twice), Las Vegas and Los Angeles for big meets. The meet in LA was at night and the course was lit with lights. Former SK runner John Nelson was going to college near LA and came over and helped Santos and his assistant Paul Zimmer coach for that one night, which for everybody involved was a beautiful thing. The team later went to Disneyland.

One of the kids that Santos recruited to his program was Drew Polley, who after being cut in soccer during his sophomore year was encouraged by Santos to come out for track and try running.

“I recruited him out of my PE class,” says Santos. “I told him he needed to run. Look where he is today.”

Polley, now one of America’s top distance runners, reluctantly did and in the fall of 2003 finished 39th at the state cross-country meet.

“He was still learning the craft then,” said Santos of Polley, who graduated from SK in 2004, “but he was working very hard.”

What did Santos see in Polley to recruit him?

“He had the intangibles,” Santos said. “And he was unbelievable coachable. Once he brought into it, he was going to be as good as he could possibly be.” Polley went on to run for Washington State and in April was the fifth American to finish in the Boston Marathon, taking 16th overall with a time of 2:16.36. His time qualified Polley for the U.S. Olympic Trials that will be held in Houston.

Santos is most proud of the kids who have gone on to college and started high-profile careers. Polley, of course, is the most public figure of them all. He graduated from WSU in 2009 with a degree in civic engineering and is now running with the sponsorship of Hansons Brooks Distance Project out of the Detroit area.

Sitting is his office at SK, Santos glanced at all the team pictures he has on his walls and started clicking off former runners of his who have gone on to do well. Natalie Rasmussen went to the University of Tulsa and is a lawyer in Kingston. Eileen Morley is in medical school at US Davis.

“It’s great,” says Santos as he counts off three engineers, a PhD candidate, from the pictures.

“Just look at these kids,” he says proudly.

Santos is 51 now and doesn’t have time to look back much. But when he does he thinks of Herrington, who he hasn’t had contact with in about eight years but thinks maybe it’s time to do so.

“He was a big influence on my life,” says Santos. “He’s just a great person. He cared for us as people and really made me think this was what I wanted to do.”

Santos remembers now how he got so many good and caring kids to run for him. He would scan the honor rolls at the three junior highs – Sedgwick, Cedar Heights, and Marcus Whitman – and make contact with them.

“The kids that are good or great students have an understanding of hard work and an understanding of a long-term commitment to goals,” Santos says. “They don’t have that need for an immediate fix, instant gratification. They understand if they work had they will get somewhere. Those are the kids who make good distance runners. They have the work ethic.”

As he looks even further back, Santos realizes how much he has changed. He wasn’t even close to being a runner as a kid, but is absolutely passionate about it now.

“Distance running made me who I am, absolutely,” he says. “Before I found running in high school I was pretty shy, nerdy, a good student, but pretty quiet. After I started running, it sure made me feel more confident.”

He’s still running, in a sense. It’s hard to catch him in his office. There are things to do, people to see, problems to fix, schedules to be made.

“It’s a good job,” says Santos, who took over for Steve Reischmann in 2004. “I do enjoy it. My job is to be the head coach for the whole coaching staff. That is where I kind of lie.

“My favorite part of the job is to get around after games and check in with the coach, see how the game went, win, lose or draw, however it may be. Those times are the most fun and rewarding. I get to ask how the game went, what went wrong or right, what could have been done differently, what could have been done better. I really enjoy those conversations.”

There is a lot to enjoy for Santos, who feels blessed to have come down this path from his beginnings as that nerdy kid who was lucky to get an inspiration from a teacher.

“I would not be sitting here today,” he says, “if not for a high school teacher and coach saying to me, ‘hey, you should try this.’

“That’s why I’m here.”