CRUZ TAKES CONTROL : Runner Wobbled for a Year at Valley After High School Success, but Now Is Favored in 10,000 at JC Championship

Two weeks ago, in the Southern California community college track championships, Valley College’s Eugene Cruz won the 10,000 meters by out-kicking the field down the final stretch.

He pulled away to win by almost three seconds and qualified as the favorite in Saturday’s Ford-California Community College Track and Field Championships.

“A year ago,” said Mark Covert, Cruz’s coach, “if it came down to the last lap he would have been beaten.”

A year ago, Cruz was limping away from a freshman season marred by missed practices, bitter arguments with his coach, nagging injures and, worst of all, losses.

The season came as a bitter disappointment for a young man who had graduated from Burbank High as one of the top schoolboy distance runners in the state. In the course of a single season, Cruz had fallen from an ascending high school star to a junior college also-ran.

This year, the 19-year-old runner has already won the state cross-country championship. He holds Mountain Valley Conference titles in the 1,500, the 5,000 and the 10,000 meters and is unbeaten in any race longer than 5,000 meters.

Cruz’s transformation from angry young runner to state champion is the story of a young man growing up--and the track coach who earned his trust.

Eugene Cruz shows none of the bravado or swagger you’d expect from a top athlete. At 5-9 and 135 pounds, he is thin, almost fragile. He speaks softly and slowly, waving his long, thin hands through the air as if he needed them to force out the words. When he talks about running competitively, Cruz does not sound like a state champion.

“Losing doesn’t bother me. You can’t win all the time,” the sophomore said, sitting in the infield after an afternoon workout. “I just like to run. I like the competition.”

A soccer player in junior high school, Cruz took up running, as he put it, “for the hell of it,” during his sophomore year at North Hollywood. He was good at long distances and chose cross-country because he preferred running up and down hills and looking at trees to circling a track.

Success came immediately for the slight teen-ager: he won the 10th-grade City cross-country title. The following year, Cruz took the varsity championship and did not lose a race all season.

Just before his senior year his family moved to Burbank, which forced Cruz to transfer to Burbank High and gave him the opportunity to become one of a handful of Los Angeles athletes in any sport to win championships in both the L.A. City and Southern sections of the CIF.

Cruz fell short, however, finishing second in the Southern Section cross-country finals. Still, he graduated as one of the state’s top high school cross-country runners, and college coaches expected him to use that strength in the 10,000 meters. (The longest race in high school track is less than 3,500 meters.)

“His mark is not going to be made in high school, because he’s an outstanding 10,000-meter prospect,” said Burbank Coach Dave Kemp, just before Cruz’s senior year.

“I don’t think there’d be five high school runners in the country who could beat him at 10,000 meters. I think among those (college recruiters) who have seen him and realize what he can do, he’ll be a pretty hot commodity.”

Despite the championships and the accolades, Cruz says he was a “flake-off” in high school, constantly missing practices and barely sliding by in the classroom. Afraid that he might not be able to handle the academic workload of a four-year school, Cruz chose to attend Valley for two years.

He figured that two years of running at the junior college level couldn’t be much tougher than high school. It would be a nice break, a chance to win and improve in a low-pressure environment.

But that’s where he was wrong. “When you’re 17 or 18, you think you know it all, Cruz said. “You think you don’t need anybody to tell you anything.”

His junior college running career started out on the wrong foot--before he even got to school. The summer before his freshman year, Cruz required emergency surgery for appendicitis and missed summer training, a must for cross-country runners.

The layoff cost him dearly. Running against what Cruz considered weak competition in the now-abolished junior college Division II, he had to settle for a second-place finish at the state finals.

“The way I was running, I was lucky to get that,” he said.

Things went from bad to worse on the track that spring. He expected more of the same--weak competition--running the 1,500, 5,000 and 10,000 meters. So he continued his high school practice of missing practices.

And he quickly ran into a brick wall by the name of Mark Covert, the track coach at Valley. Covert believes that hard work and dedication are the keys to running. Covert and Cruz did not hit it off.

“Eugene was like most freshmen who were stars in high school,” Covert said. “He did not have to work to win in high school. He came here and would miss workouts; he would not train.

“I think he thought I was trying to kill him,” Covert added, recalling their arguments over training--or lack thereof. “He was stubborn, and I was just as stubborn because I knew how good he could be. Instead of working together, we were butting heads.”

The track season that followed was a dismal one for Cruz.

But there came a turning point. Last summer, Covert got Cruz a job working as a handyman in his father-in-law’s Burbank machine shop. Coach and runner ran together in the mornings and talked to each other at work. They got to know each other better.

Cruz said he came to several realizations that summer. First, he made up his mind to win at track, knowing that he would have to train to do so. He also realized that an athletic scholarship might be his only shot at his longtime dream of earning a degree from a four-year college.

That summer, Cruz said, he also learned something about his coach.

“Once you find out how a person is, you respect that,” Cruz said. “I guess I learned to trust him. He knows a lot more about running than I do. I thought I didn’t need him, but I really did. I needed to be disciplined.”

“It took me a while to get to know him,” said Covert, himself a former state junior college cross-country champion. “He doesn’t respond to me hovering over him and shoving it down his throat all the time. There are times I have to push him, but there are more times when I back away and let him do what he needs to do.

“I guess the big difference is that he accepted the challenge. It was a shock to him, not to have the success he had at the high school level. He had to do more work to win at the college level. He matured, and now he knows what he has to do.”

With a summer of good workouts behind him, Cruz swept to the state cross-country title, running against tough competition in the state’s new combined Division I. In the final race, Cruz finished seven seconds ahead of second-place Jesus Guiterrez, who had beaten Cruz several times when the two ran against each other as high school seniors.

Cruz continued his strict training regimen into the track season, running every day, 80 to 90 miles per week, learning strategy from Covert. What resulted was a winning season and fast times.

Cruz’s bests are 30:12 in the 10,000, 14:48 in the 5,000 and 3:57 in the 1,500.

“I think he can run a lot faster than he has,” Covert said. “There isn’t a lot of competition for him at the junior college level. He hasn’t had the opportunity to run fast.

“He has a lot of talent, and he could go a long, long way.”

Covert is not the only one who is impressed. “If Eugene comes into the Pac-10, I think he can be among the top handful of cross-country runners next season,” said Larry Knuth, assistant track and head cross-country coach at USC.

“I know the coaching influence he has been under has been a positive influence, and I would like to have any kid coached by Mark.”

At Fresno State, the school Cruz is leaning toward, the cross-country team finished one place away from qualifying for the NCAA finals last year. Said Red Estes, Fresno State track coach: “Eugene has a great future at Fresno State. He will run on some championship teams.”

A long-distance runner is not expected to come into his prime until age 27 or 28. So, the coaches say, Cruz’s future depends on his willingness to continue running after college.

But first there are the state finals. He ran the second-fastest 10,000 in the state this year, but because the runner with the fastest time is out for the season with a leg injury, Cruz’s shot at a state title looks very good.

It makes for quite a different story than last year’s. “The losing demonstrated to me that if you can do the work, you can win,” Cruz said. “I grew up.”