Mules junior Dallas Brown starts off strong this past week at the Incarnate Word Shamrock Classic at Brooks-City Base. Brown finished sixth overall with a time of 17:13:51. Photo by Marvin Pfeiffer

Conditions were nearly perfect as the Alamo Heights Cross Country team came to the line Saturday for the Incarnate Word Shamrock Classic meet at Brooks City Base. The weather was cool and the sky was cloudy – perfect running weather — and they delivered.

Alamo Heights cross country, under the direction of new head coach John McLaren, is off to a fast start. They’ve already left their mark in the three meets they’ve run and are hungry to do the same in coming weeks.

While McLaren is working with a fairly young team, he sees the program blossoming into something special. He’s relying on a combination of youth, desire and talent to get the young Mules to where he wants them to be.

McLaren, who actually teaches at Alamo Heights Junior School, is in his first year of coaching at the high school. He ran cross country in college at Cornerstone University in Michigan and acted as his college team’s head coach while there when the coach left during his senior year.

Even with their youth, the Mules boys and girls teams this year are not short on talent. McLaren sees his boys team in contention for regional, if not state honors, and the girls team not far behind.

The boys are paced by junior Dallas Brown, who finished sixth in Saturday’s meet. Although shorthanded, the boys team finished second overall for the second straight time and McLaren sees them going far.

“Our number three guy, Calvin Howell, was out today,” McLaren said. “Adam Thomas dropped out, so our third and fourth guys basically weren’t able to run today, so they’re actually a lot better than what they even showed today.”

Brown, who finished further back than what he had hoped for at the Incarnate Word meet, was trying a different strategy that coach McLaren had wanted him to try. Dallas usually likes to stay in the top 15 during the early stages of the race, and then pick off runners one-by-one as the race progresses, but McLaren wanted to see what he could do by challenging for the lead this time.

“We tried a new philosophy today,” McLaren said. “I wanted him to go out in about a 5:08. He went out in a 5:06 first mile, and then second mile he tried to stick with that guy from Judson who went out way too fast. But he was trying to use him as a pacer, but then he went out too fast for himself too.”

“If you never try to be a front runner you don’t know if you can do it, so this is the race to try it on,” McLaren said. “I want to try it now before district. I want to try it now before Regional. Those are the ones you don’t try something new on those ones.”

“I pressed way to hard the first mile,” said Brown. “It’s not my race, so now I learned from it. I’ll try to do better next race.”

The girls team was paced by outstanding sophomore Shannon Canty, who finished fourth with a time of 13:03:02. The girls finished in fourth place in the previous meet and sixth this past week at Brooks.

“Our goal is to have fun,” Canty said. “We’d like to make it to regionals like last year because it’s a great feeling. We just want to go as far as we can and give it our all.”

While McLaren hopes for success this year, he also sees the bigger picture on where he’s leading his athletes.

“The kids at Alamo Heights … they push themselves academically, they push themselves in everything, and they just need to find the right way to push themselves,” McLaren said. “Hopefully you lead them in the right way and they become better people. That’s really what we’re out here to do … make them better kids. And if they become better kids and they do well in cross country, that’s even more fun!”

McLaren also sees a bright future down the road for the Alamo Heights cross country program.

“We started our middle school program this year and that’s going to make a huge difference.” McLaren said. “We’ve got some good kids in the middle school coming up. The boys team took first place in a meet against Boerne and we’re still developing the girls team, but there’s going to be some good middle school kids coming up.”