newsminer.com

FAIRBANKS — Kailey Wilson is a freshman at Kenny Lake High School with no teammates and no prior experience competing as a runner.

Heck, until last week she didn’t even have a Kenny Lake running singlet.

What Wilson does have plenty of, however, is guts, talent and smarts, and that combination has made her a favorite on Saturday at the 1A-2A-3A state high school cross country championships in Palmer.

Wilson’s emergence and undefeated season has surprised herself, her coach Jesse Heinbaugh and fellow competitors.

“Actually I just started competing this year. It was really a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing,” Wilson said by telephone Sept. 23.

Wilson only began running this season on July 30 (she now trains five days a week), but it’s not like she was a couch potato before that.

“I’m in a lot of sports like basketball, volleyball and, during the summer, swimming and doing other things,” Wilson said.

Her mom, Dee Dee, who ran cross country in high school in Owatonna, Minn., sometimes joins her on runs.

“She’s living out my dream, you know,” Dee Dee said. “She’s just a natural at it.”

A foreshadowing of Wilson’s ability came during weekly 1-mile runs in a middle school physical education class.

“The first four months of the year, not even any of the guys could touch her times. She was smoking everybody,” Heinbaugh said.

Wilson’s best 1-mile mark in eighth grade was 5 minutes, 54 seconds, but her coming-out-party for the rest of Alaska came on Sept. 6 at the Palmer Invitational, which featured 1,200 runners from 45 schools. On the same Janecek Trails course that will be used for the state championships, Wilson passed Grace Christian’s Mariah Applegate in the final 200 meters of the 5-kilometer 1A-2A-3A event to win by four seconds in 19:50.

“She just turned on the kick,” said Heinbaugh, who going into that race was just hoping Wilson would make the top five. “You could see the pain on her face, but she pushed through.”

And Wilson wasn’t even racing on fresh legs. A day earlier, she won the freshmen-sophomore 3K Anchorage Christian School Challenge.

“That was a huge weekend. It was an eye-opener,” Heinbaugh said. “It got all the nerves out.”

Other victories followed, notably topping the Interior’s best Class 4A runners at the Delta Junction Invitational on Sept. 20 and blowing away the competition last Saturday at the Region II championships. At Su Valley High School, her 19:17 time was 28 seconds ahead of the small schools runner-up.

Senior Heather Edic of Lathrop High School, along with North Pole’s Christi Schmitz, were the victims in Delta. Wilson led much of the first mile, then lurked a few seconds behind the pair before blowing past them near the end.

“She stayed enough away that we didn’t even hear her,” said Edic, the Region VI Class 4A champion. “We thought we had dropped her. She came out of nowhere. We had no idea she was there any more.”

Wilson surely won’t be sneaking up on anyone on Saturday, though. With the exception of Haines’ Stoli Lende, she’s raced against all the top small schools runners at some point this year.

Wilson’s work ethic stands out, said Heinbaugh, who is also her English teacher and noted that she is a 4.0 student.

“She’s the hardest-working girl around. She just doesn’t give up,” Heinbaugh said. “She has a lot of focus, a lot of guts, especially toward the end of a race.”

Heinbaugh, who doesn’t have a running background, trains with Wilson as often as possible and is challenged to keep up.

“I think by next year I’ll have to find somebody faster,” he said.

What Wilson lacks is other Hawks to run with, not that they’d be able to stay with her.

“It’s kind of lonely, but it makes it easier,” Wilson said. “It gives (Heinbaugh) more time to focus on just one person.”

Kenny Lake is located in the Copper River Valley just south of Glennallen and its K-12 school has an enrollment of about 130 students. Wilson is hopeful she’ll have company in the future.

“I’ve had people come up to me and say that they want to do it next year,” said Wilson, who will turn 15 on Oct. 10.

Wilson’s situation is drawing comparisons to Christy Virgin, who ran solo for Glennallen High School as a senior and won the 1997 1A-2A-3A state championship by blazing 19:05 on the same Palmer course.

Virgin continued her career at Colorado State University and now lives in Rochester, Minn. She still holds the small schools course record in Palmer of 18:50.

Rebecca McMahon of Glennallen also won a state cross country title in 1999, but no runner from the Copper River Valley has won one since.

“It would be pretty awesome,” Wilson said. “We’ve got a pretty good chance.”