Benefield: Onetime Redwood Empire competitors now running as a team

Sonoma County has been good to Kirk Elias.

Three of the University of Nevada cross country coach’s top five finishers at the season-opening Nevada Twilight race are from area high schools.

Delaney White, a freshman out of Santa Rosa High, and Adria Barich, a freshman from Casa Grande, finished second and third respectively at the Sept. 2 event. Shannon Palladino, a 2015 Maria Carrillo grad, finished fifth. Madison Parratt, who graduated from Petaluma High in 2016 and is a walk-on, finished 14th overall.

“I recruit California pretty heavily, northern and southern,” Elias said.

He struck gold in Sonoma County.

White was the All-Empire Cross Country runner of the year in her senior year and was named All-Empire large-school scholar athlete of the year. She was also a first team All-Empire pick in track. Barich was a first team All-Empire in both track and cross country and Palladino was second team All-Empire in both sports her senior year.

Elias said his recruiting magic in this area was “a perfect storm.”

“Last year everything came together,” he said.

“It was a big recruiting class that came in. It was also the best recruiting class I have ever had,” he said.

It’s a group people could be talking about for awhile.

On the Wolf Pack’s 17-person roster are eight freshmen, six sophomores, two juniors and a senior. The top 10 runners typically compete.

“I personally like it because we have so much more potential than, I think, other teams,” White said. “Imagine where we are going to be in our junior or senior years. The entire team has such a way to grow.”

Elias spoke in a cautious tone.

“I did not set goals for this team. We are so young,” he said. “The goal was to learn to race well. We didn’t talk about where we wanted to finish in the conference.”

And the Mountain West Conference is fierce.

While White’s impact was to some extent expected, Barich’s early showing has been a bit of an eye-opener for Elias.

“She’s a big surprise,” he said. “She ran No. 3 for us in the first meet. I did not expect that.

“She doesn’t have the background that a lot of the other kids do,” he said. “She has jumped up a large level in one fall over what she was doing the previous year. That is a pretty good indication that she is nowhere near what her ceiling is.”

Barich, who added a ton of mileage to her routine in the months leading up to the start of the season, said she has gained inspiration from her new teammates.

“Just the dedication of everyone on the team,” she said. “Everyone is all in, all the time. It’s not something I’m used to. It’s really inspiring.”

Still, it can be a tall order, asking freshmen to tackle the stresses of the first few months of college along with the first few months of a Div. I sport. Having a familiar face around can help, they said.

Parratt said having a team to fall back on made the transition easier. She called the squad “a small family.”

“My first race I was so nervous, but I had girls I was racing with from home and it was so comforting,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting so much support from everybody.”

Barich said the transition was made easier by a preseason camp in Tahoe in which the runners were made to stay in a cramped living space.

“All the freshmen stayed in this one really tiny room,” she said. “That is how we became really close really fast. We all know that we are on the same page. None of us see each other as ‘Oh, she’s faster.’”

And having a teammate who already knows the context from which you’ve emerged as a runner is comforting, White said.

“It’s such a big transition, it just makes you feel a little more confident when you go,” she said.

And teammates know what you are talking about when you talk about “the Spring Lake course” or reference Bob Shor’s starter gun routine.

“We have something to base everything off of,” Barich said. “I have these girls who know what it is like to be from Sonoma County and have them relate.”

It also might make a runner faster.

“They know the level you can train at and compete at, so it’s helping you stay accountable,” White said.

That’s good news because much of the Wolf Pack’s success could depend on team chemistry - no easy feat when the majority of a recruiting class was the cream of the crop at their respective high schools.

“You are talking about the ‘Queen Bee Syndrome,’” Elias said. “Everybody used to be the best athlete at their high school. They are used to attention.”

So relationships are key to navigating that as a team.

“You have to be OK with other people being successful. There is enough room for everyone to be successful,” he said. “You have to be happy about that. You want to be around other good athletes; that’s what is going to make you better.”

That might bode well for the Wolf Pack. After all, a quarter of their roster has been around each other for four years.

Once competitors, they are now teammates.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes: “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”