Flashes of Brilliance : Shaw and Aparicio Achieve Marks of Distinction as National-Caliber Runners at Fillmore High

Tucked away near the foothills of eastern Ventura County lies the small agricultural town of Fillmore (pop. about 12,000). Pickup trucks are a common form of transportation, and most of the businesses are located along Central Avenue, the main drag off Highway 126, which connects Interstate 5 with the 101 Freeway.

Fillmore High, with an enrollment of 850, also is located on Central, but there is nothing small time about the running talents of two of its students, Nikki Shaw and Maribella Aparicio, who rank among the nation’s best high school girls’ runners in their events.

“It’s possible that they could win three state titles between them and that would put us in the race for the state title,” Fillmore track Coach Joe Torres said. “But we’re not going to do anything to jeopardize their individual chances there in pursuit of a team title.”

Shaw, a senior, was runner-up in the 1,600 meters in last year’s state meet and is equally strong in the 800. With personal bests of 4 minutes 49.01 seconds in the 1,600 and 2:09.19 in the 800, she is the nation’s top returning high school runner in the former event and the No. 3 returner in the latter.

Aparicio, a junior, placed sixth in the 3,200 in the state meet. With a personal best of 10:45.39, she ranks eighth in the nation among returning runners. Four of the five girls who finished ahead of her return, but Aparicio has improved dramatically since last June, a seventh-place finish in the Kinney national cross-country championships in December topping her accomplishments.

“I really want to improve my time in the (3,200) from last year,” Aparicio said. “I’m in much better shape at this point in the season than I was last year.”

The Flashes’ dynamic duo will start their seasons today in the Sunkist Invitational indoor track meet at the Sports Arena. Shaw will run in the girls’ seeded mile, and Aparicio will compete in the two-mile run.

Shaw is one of the most highly recruited middle-distance runners in the nation.

She was born in Delran, N.J., about 10 miles west of Willingboro, the birthplace of Carl Lewis. Shaw lived in Delran until 1983, when her father moved the family to Fillmore so he could take over his parents’ citrus ranch. A 1955 Fillmore graduate and a retired computer engineer, Douglas Shaw kept track of his daughter’s progress after she joined the Fillmore Condors track team in 1985. He began coaching her during her freshman season at Fillmore in 1988 and Nikki has improved steadily under her father’s tutelage.

Shaw lowered her personal bests to 2:15.54 in the 800 and to 5:01.93 in the 1,600 as a freshman. Her times improved to 2:12.98 and 4:59.07 as a sophomore. She was eliminated in a qualifying heat of the 1,600 in the 1989 state meet, then placed seventh in the finals of the 800 as a sophomore before her runner-up finish in the 1,600 last season.

She credits her father for much of her improvement.

“He really understands me and knows what makes me tick,” she said. “He probably knows how to handle me better psychologically than another coach might, and that’s important.”

Douglas attributes his daughter’s success to a blend of talent and discipline. “She sets goals for herself and, amazingly, for a teen-ager in today’s world, she carries them out,” he said.

Douglas’ penchant for detail--which he attributes to his engineering background--and Nikki’s determination to reach her goals have led to some unusual training methods: The majority of her workouts begin at 4:30 a.m., and Douglas said she does 90% of her running on a treadmill while her father watches. He frequently videotapes the workouts so that her running form can be analyzed.

“(Running on the treadmill) is the easiest way for me to see how she’s doing,” Douglas said. “The surface is always the same, therefore I can see differences in her form more easily. I can usually tell if she’s too rested or too tired.”

That training technique is likely to end this season. The treadmill no longer can keep pace. The top speed the machine can simulate is 12 miles per hour, or five minutes a mile. Shaw frequently exceeds that during interval workouts.

“She’s either going to have to start running on the track or I’m going to have to buy a better treadmill,” Douglas said with a laugh.

Douglas also videotapes many of his daughter’s races for analysis as well as for keepsakes. “I always go home and study them,” Nikki said. “I analyze my form and my stride and I also see what I did in certain situations in a race. Sometimes, things happen so quickly out there that you just react and can’t remember what happened afterward. It helps to go back later and see what you did at a particular point in a race, and if you made the right move.”

There is more to Nikki’s life than running. She has a 3.78 grade-point average, is the student vice president and belongs to several clubs on campus. She scored 1,070 points on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Many major NCAA Division I schools have inquired about Shaw, according to Torres, and she has narrowed her list of colleges to Villanova, Arkansas, Stanford and Oregon. “Nikki is going to be like a 500-pound gorilla,” Torres said. “She’s going to pretty much go wherever she wants.”

Aparicio surprised some with her rise to prominence last fall. Fillmore cross-country Coach Epi Torres (no relation to Joe) was not among them. In fact, Torres said that Aparicio would have reached prominence as a sophomore had she not fainted near the end of her race in the 1990 Southern Section Division IV cross-country preliminaries at Mt. San Antonio College.

Racing on an unseasonably hot November day, Aparicio was leading her qualifying heat by a large margin when she collapsed on a small incline 20 meters before the finish line of the three-mile race. After trying unsuccessfully to regain her balance and finish, she blacked out.

Aparicio recovered and Fillmore qualified for the section championships the following week at Mt. SAC. Aparicio finished second, but it took time for her to shed the doubts from that earlier experience.

“She really wasn’t the same runner for several months after that,” Torres said. “It just took her a while to get to the point where she could push herself completely in races again.”

Aparicio acknowledges as much.

“I tried to get it out of my head right away,” she said. “But something like that is hard to forget. . . . I felt fine until the last 400 yards when, suddenly, my legs got real heavy. When I fell down, I told myself, ‘Mari, you’ve got to get up.’ But I couldn’t.”

The incident might have been a blessing in disguise. Torres said Aparicio has been more serious about her running as a junior.

The improved work ethic paid dividends with victories in the section and state Division IV championships, a fifth-place finish in the Kinney West regional and a seventh-place finish at nationals.

Aparicio’s goals for the track season are to run under 10:30 in the 3,200 and just to be “up there at the state meet.”

Like Shaw, Aparicio is coached primarily by her father, a graduate of Fillmore, and, like her teammate, she is not a Fillmore native. She has lived there since the mid-’80s when her father moved his family from Utah back to his boyhood stomping grounds.

Aparicio’s father Ben still holds the Fillmore High record in the boys’ two-mile (9:15), which he set in 1968, and he and Epi Torres--a ’69 Fillmore graduate--ran on the cross-country and track teams at Moorpark College and Cal State Chico. “He’s still a pretty good runner,” Torres said of Ben Aparicio. “He still does quite well in the local road races.”

Aparicio’s first exposure to distance running came when she timed her father as a child during his workouts. One of her uncles persuaded her to join the Fillmore Condors when she was in the fourth grade.

The outgoing Aparicio enjoys dancing and playing the piano. She has taken lessons since the third grade. A B-average student, she has received recruiting letters from several Division I schools, including Arkansas, Northern Arizona, Stanford and Notre Dame.

Aparicio, however, could end up at Brigham Young, located near the Wasatch Mountains in Provo, Utah. “I saw that campus when we lived in Utah,” Aparicio said. “It was beautiful.”

Shaw and Aparicio plan to continue running after college.

“I would like to go to the Olympics someday,” Aparicio said. “I know it won’t be easy to do that, but I think that’s the ultimate goal of every good runner.”

Shaw concurred: “I’ve definitely thought about them. The Olympics are my ultimate goal.”

Big-time aspirations for a pair of small-town girls.