Coaches Walk On to Run Off With Titles : Cross-country: Hart’s boys, Agoura’s girls build a tradition of excellence and are ranked No. 1 in the country.

Hart and Agoura highs are less than 30 miles apart, and they are the top cross-country programs in the state and the nation.

The Hart boys and Agoura girls, the defending State Division I champions, are ranked No. 1 in the country by The Harrier magazine.

Hart, with an enrollment of 2,000 in Newhall, has won two Southern Section titles in a row and captured its ninth consecutive Foothill League championship last week.

The Indians, who have placed no lower than fourth in the Southern Section finals since 1984, have won the Mt. San Antonio College, Stanford and Royal invitationals this season.

Agoura, with an enrollment of 1,200, has won four Southern Section titles and five Ventura County championships in a row.

The teams will take their first steps toward defense of their state crowns Saturday at the Southern Section preliminaries at Mt. SAC.

The Hart girls and Agoura boys also have enjoyed their share of success.

Hart’s girls have won 45 consecutive league meets since 1983 and have gone on to the Southern Section finals in eight of the past nine years. The Agoura boys have advanced to postseason competition every year since the program was formed in 1969.

However, notions of State championships and national rankings were not on the minds of Hart’s Gene Blankenship or Agoura’s Bill Duley when they took over their respective programs in 1982 and 1986.

The Hart boys finished last in the Foothill League, going 0-5 in dual meets in 1982. The girls had only four runners and forfeited all their meets because of a lack of a fifth member needed for scoring.

Agoura had only five girls in Duley’s first season. The team qualified for the Southern Section preliminaries, but Duley had to use two statisticians when he learned that a full team of seven runners was required in postseason competition.

Neither school has had a problem with numbers this season. There are 97 runners at Hart and 52 at Agoura--the largest turnout for either school.

Deena Drossin helped lead Agoura to the first of four Southern Section titles as a freshman in 1987. But with the graduation of Drossin, who won three State titles and is now at the University of Arkansas, Agoura’s chances for a fifth title did not appear promising. The outlook, however, improved this summer.

Sophomore Kay Nekota, who finished fourth for Woodbridge High in Irvine in the State Division II meet last season, moved to Agoura, and freshman Amy Skieresz, who broke Drossin’s age-group records in the 1,600 and 3,200 meters as a seventh-grader in 1990, transferred from Westlake High.

Agoura, which was not ranked at the start of the season and moved to the top of the national rankings in mid-October, may be stronger than ever.

The Chargers won the Woodbridge, Kenny Staub and Mt. SAC invitationals this season. Their cumulative team time at Woodbridge was more than two minutes faster than last season and by nearly 90 seconds at Kenny Staub.

“We thought we would be pretty strong,” Agoura senior Laura Hayward said. “Everybody expected us to be successful before, but this year has been different. We weren’t expecting to be as good and it’s been kind of a surprise.”

Hart’s dominance was expected. The Indians have been the top-ranked team in the country since the beginning of the season.

“What makes us so strong is that when someone goes out, we have someone who can fill in,” Blankenship said about Hart, which has seven of its top 10 runners from last season’s team that finished No. 4 in the nation.

The Indians’ last loss was to Madera of the Central Section in last year’s Mt. SAC invitational. Hart beat Madera to win the State championship and has defeated Madera, ranked third nationally, twice this season.

Duley and Blankenship have achieved their results despite being walk-on coaches. Duley, 34, a part-time carpenter and road-race director, considers being a walk-on an advantage.

“It allows me more flexibility,” said Duley, a 1975 Agoura graduate whose stepson, Bryan Dameworth, won three State titles and was the 1989 Kinney national champion at Agoura.

“I am able to focus on coaching and I’m a lot fresher for practice than if I had to teach all day.”

Blankenship, 49, who was an assistant at Canyon Country Canyon High in 1981 before moving to Hart, travels 65 miles from his Pearblossom home to Hart and works full time for the Los Angeles County Dept. of Parks and Recreation.

Four of his five assistant coaches are unpaid walk-ons. One assistant, Phil De La Cerda, whose son Paul and daughter Jessica are on the team, is a fireman.

“I used to want to hide my face when people asked me if I ran cross-country,” said junior Keith Grossman, Hart’s No. 1 runner. “Now, people wish me good luck when I race, and the program is gaining a reputation. That’s been a big inspiration.”

Tradition plays a big part at Agoura as well.

“Cross-country is the winningest sport at the school and gets a lot of respect,” Duley said. “We have a real positive atmosphere and a lot of good places to train with grass and rolling hills.”

Malibu Creek State Park, Cheeseboro Canyon and Paramount Ranch Park are within three miles of the Agoura campus. The bulk of Hart’s training is done in the hills of the Santa Clarita Valley.

Blankenship organizes annual summer training camps, and this year’s team traveled to Winter Park, Colo. He has taken his teams to Lake Tahoe, San Francisco and Brian Head, Utah.

News about both schools should continue to circulate around the country next season. The Hart boys have only one senior among their top nine runners and the Agoura girls will lose only one runner from their top five.