He Finally Sees Mother Knows Best

At 5 feet 8 inches and 115 pounds, Aaron Sharp of Santa Clara High might be the smallest athlete competing in the state track and field championships at Cerritos College on Saturday.

But there is no questioning Sharp’s heart.

That was evident in the Southern Section Masters Meet at Cerritos last Friday when the Saint senior finished second in the boys’ 3,200 meters with a career-best of 9:12.06.

That Sharp advanced to the state championships by finishing among the top five finishers wasn’t surprising considering he was the No. 5-seeded runner entering the race.

But the fact that he beat third-place Steve Smith of Ayala, fourth-place Jose Herrera of Loara, fifth-place Ronnie Buchanan of Righetti and sixth-place Dusty Herman of Nordhoff would have been unfathomable six months ago.

Smith, Herman and Buchanan finished 1-2-3 in the West region cross-country championships in December and Herrera placed ninth in the state Division II final the previous week.

Sharp won the state Division V title in an upset, but his winning time of 15:58 over the 5,000-meter course at Woodward Park in Fresno was bettered by 19 runners from the Southern Section and 37 runners overall that day.

So how has the soft-spoken Sharp become one of the top 3,200-meter runners in the section--and possibly the state--during track season?

By building on a training base that was laid over the previous 3 1/2 years and improving his finishing speed.

“We knew what it would take to get to state,” said Debra Sharp, Aaron’s mother and the boys’ and girls’ cross-country coach at Santa Clara. “But if the athlete can’t do the workouts that they need to, all the planning in the world won’t matter.”

Herman, the 1996 and ’97 Ventura County cross-country champion, has noticed the difference this year.

After finishing 35 seconds ahead of the fourth-place Sharp in the county cross-country championships last year, Herman beat him by eight-tenths of a second to win the 3,200 in the Frontier League finals and by 1.3 seconds to win the Southern Section Division III title before being beaten by him in the Masters Meet.

“We always knew he had the distance background,” Herman said. “But he now obviously has the speed too. I think he must have worked on his speed in the off-season.”

Although Sharp’s second-place finish in the Masters Meet shocked a lot of so-called high school track experts, he and his mom weren’t particularly surprised.

Both said his workouts have been geared to breaking 9:10 in the race Saturday.

“We’ve just run more quality and quantity in workouts,” Debra said. “The pace [in intervals] is faster and we do more of them.”

Added Aaron: “We thought these times were possible. Of course, it’s easier to talk about them than to actually do them, but we thought we could.”

It’s interesting to note Sharp’s use of the word “we,” because he and his mother didn’t always work well together as athlete and coach.

There were times during his freshman cross-country season when he would deliberately run faster than instructed during part of a workout because he was upset with his mother about something.

That forced his mom to inform Aaron that when it came to running, she was the teacher and he was the pupil.

There was no room for the mother-son relationship during those times, so he had to address her as Coach or Mrs. Sharp during workouts or at meets.

Aaron has become so accustomed to that, he sometimes calls her Mrs. Sharp at home.

“I’ve grown up a lot since then,” Sharp said of his difficulties with his mom. “I was just a freshman back then.”

Sharp’s time in the 3,200 has improved dramatically since he began running in high school.

After clocking 11:09 as a freshman, he ran 9:58.27 as a sophomore and 9:37.49 as a junior before breaking the school record three times in the last four meets.

His first school record was a 9:19.6 clocking in the Frontier League final on May 8 and he followed that with a 9:16.20 effort in the Southern Section Division III final on May 23.

His time of 9:12.06 last week and a 3.25 grade-point-average will undoubtedly generate some interest among coaches at four-year colleges, but Sharp plans to attend Oxnard College in the fall.

He won’t run for Oxnard since the school doesn’t field a cross-country or track team, but junior college rules would allow him to run for another school, such as Ventura or Moorpark.

Running for a junior college might seem like a letdown for someone who has improved as much as Sharp this season, but his mother thinks it’ll be the perfect fit for her son.

“He’s always been small for his age,” she said. “But I think he’s going to develop quite a bit in the next couple of years. I think sending him to a four-year school right now would be a great chance to get him injured.”