Nekota Slows, Gets Back in Fast Lane : Basketball Fuels Added Drive in Agoura Runner

For most high school distance runners, a fifth-place finish in the 1992 California state Division I cross-country championships would be a great finale to a season.

For Kay Nekota of Agoura High, however, finishing fifth in the state meet as a junior signaled that it was time for a change. It was time to take a break from the rigors of long-distance running and do something else athletically.

“I had just been (running) for so long that I needed a break in my routine,” Nekota said. “I guess you could say things had become too regular. Everything seemed to be the same.”

In order to add spice to the athletic part of her life, Nekota played basketball on Agoura’s junior varsity team before helping the Chargers to a second-place finish in the Southern Section Division I track championships in May.

Although Nekota was not a starter in basketball and logged limited playing time, being a member of the team was a valuable experience.

First, it gave her the desired break from running, yet kept her in shape.

Secondly, it exposed her to something that she had never done before, broadening her horizons, as she puts it. And thirdly, it rekindled her desire for running.

“It was definitely a learning experience,” Nekota said. “I was starting from ground zero, while everyone else had been playing basketball for at least a couple of years. But I enjoyed it. . . . I think it helped to remotivate and refocus myself about running.”

Nekota’s mother, Susan, said that playing basketball helped her daughter realize how much she enjoyed running.

“From that experience, she learned that she doesn’t run to be the winner,” Susan said. “She runs because she loves to run.”

Bill Duley, the cross-country and track coach at Agoura, sees a big difference between the Nekota of 1993 and the 1992 model.

“She is much more focused this year and a lot more enthusiastic about her training,” he said. “It wasn’t like she had a bad attitude last year, but she wasn’t into it like she had been as a sophomore. She really stuck it out because of her duty to the team.”

The renewed enthusiasm has translated into performances that are ahead of the pace Nekota set as a sophomore, when she finished second in the state Division I cross-country championships, and ran personal bests of 5 minutes 0.98 seconds in the 1,600 meters and 10:52.68 in the 3,200 during track.

She opened the season by finishing second--with a personal best time of 17:30 over the three-mile course--in the Woodbridge Invitational and followed that with a third-place effort in the Vulcan Invitational in Birmingham, Ala.

Highly touted junior teammate Amy Skieresz placed first and second in those races, but with Skieresz sidelined by flu, Nekota led the Chargers to runaway victories in two Marmonte League meets during the past two weeks.

Nekota had a whopping 1-minute 26-second victory margin in a meet against Westlake and Camarillo on Oct. 7 and it was 1:28 versus Thousand Oaks and Channel Islands last Thursday.

Yet when Agoura competes in the team sweepstakes race of the Mt. San Antonio College Invitational on Saturday, spectators will expect Skieresz--not Nekota--to lead the Chargers to their fourth victory in the past five years.

Playing second fiddle on a team might prove detrimental to the psyche of some elite high school distance runners, but Nekota has handled the situation well, despite being Agoura’s No. 1 runner as a sophomore and Woodbridge’s top gun as a freshman.

“It is different because I was the No. 1 runner at Woodbridge and when I first came here,” she said. “But I don’t worry about (being No. 2). I’m really just interested in improving myself, improving my times and helping the team.”

Nekota, whose last name translates to, “the cat in the rice paddy,” in Japanese, is the second daughter of a Japanese-American father--his parents were born in Hiroshima--and an Anglo mother.

Her mother, who is divorced from her father, describes Kay as a very “sincere, kind, hard-working and persevering person.”

Those last two traits have paid off in school as Nekota is a straight-A student who is expected to be heavily recruited by all the collegiate distance-running powers, especially if she attains her goal of qualifying for the Foot Locker--formerly the Kinney--national cross-country championships in December.

Nekota, who will turn 17 in January, narrowly missed qualifying for nationals as a sophomore when she finished ninth in the West regional, six seconds behind the eighth--and final--qualifier.

Most cross-country aficionados expected her to improve on that performance as a junior, but she was so burned out after last year’s state championships that she pulled out of the West regional and approached Duley with her plan of playing basketball.

Although he initially had reservations because of the potential for injury, he realized that Nekota needed a break from running after competing in cross-country and track for six consecutive years.

“I knew that she needed to do something else,” Duley said. “She had never really had a break from running since she started so I figured it would probably be for the best.”

After basketball, Nekota began running again, and although her junior times on the track were slower than her sophomore marks, she advanced farther in postseason competition, finishing third in the 1,600 meters and fourth in the 3,200 in the Southern Section Division I championships.

She followed track with a good summer of training--which included more intense weight workouts--and the results have been encouraging.

Nekota finished only eight seconds and 12 seconds behind Skieresz in the Woodbridge and Vulcan invitationals.

Skieresz, who placed third in last year’s Kinney national championships, finished 54 seconds ahead of Nekota in last year’s state meet.

“I’m actually very happy with the way things are going,” Nekota said. “I worked hard over the summer and it’s paying off.”

Although Nekota admits that being one of the top high school runners in the state, maintaining a 4.0 grade-point average in school, and hanging out with friends can make getting enough sleep “pretty challenging,” she would not have it any other way, according to her mother.

“I have always tried to stress to her that there is more to life than running,” Susan Nekota said.

“And she has taken that to heart. Whether it’s running, or school, or her friends, or the spiritual part of her life, she does things with a lot of intensity and thoroughness.”

Kay Nekota admits that she does not want to be viewed as an athlete with a one-track mind.

“Don’t get me wrong, (running) is very important to me,” Nekota said.

“It’s something that I love to do. But it’s like my Mom always told me, ‘You’re more than just a pair of track shoes.’ ”