Cross Country: For state-bound Katy boys, girls, winning starts with the work
After sweeping the Region III-6A team titles last week, the Tiger boys and girls are confident, motivated going into the state meet on Friday
Katy cross country coach James Pat Darcey is irritated.
Darcey might be in his 24th year at the helm of the program, but he’s coaching and talking on this late October Monday morning like it’s his first day.
As runners labor around the Katy High track, Darcey is looking for anyone who cares to run at the state meet this weekend. Anyone. Anyone at all.
He’s asking—demanding?—out loud. Rhetorically.
The sun has yet to rise, and Darcey is already beginning to regret giving his runners three days off over the weekend. Under this quiet, bleak sky, he is reminding them what it’s like to hurt again.
“Sometimes they forget how to deal with the pain,” Darcey said with a smile.
It’s just a reminder. Darcey knows his runners will come around. The Tigers always do.
Katy’s boys and girls swept the Region III-6A team championships last week. The girls topped second-place Kingwood by 66 points. The boys bested district rival Tompkins by 26 points.
It is the boys’ third regional title and the girls’ second. For just the third time, Katy will have both of its teams at state.
“To be able to do that is really special,” Darcey said. “It’s hard to quantify it and the kids won’t understand it. They think it’s cool because they get a medal, and it’s even hard for kids and teachers in the school to understand. But it’s a pretty big accomplishment. Just to get to the state meet is big. If you can win a regional championship, it’s big. To win both in the same year is really big, especially coming from Katy ISD and in Region III, where there are so many good teams and so many good coaches.”
Heading into Friday’s state meet in Round Rock, Katy’s girls are senior Victoria Guerrero (sixth at regionals, 18:36.05), sophomore Lauren Acopa (ninth, 18:44.05), freshman Vienna Fish (14th, 19:09.89), freshman Abby Lester (16th, 19:13.89), freshman Avery Torrey (17th, 19:14.99), sophomore Jasmine Avalos (57th, 20:52.11) and junior Heidi Greene (87th, 21:36.25).
The boys are junior Ryder Darcey (second, 15:23.96), senior Evan Couture (seventh, 15:41.80), senior Joshua Perez (13th, 15:52.90), junior Benjamin Robins (30th, 16:25.43), junior Diego Mion (33rd, 16:32.09), sophomore Payton Patters (51st, 16:57.97) and sophomore Oliver Braithwaite (75th, 17:17.27).
It is a program in the fullest sense of the word. Most of the runners ran Darcey’s summer camps starting in the seventh grade. They’re entrenched in his ways well before they hit their teenage years.
Darcey’s workouts, which blend a personal touch with big-picture methods, are unique.
“I’ve told him plenty of times, joking around, he needs to write his own book, because the workouts we do, nobody else does them but they work really well for our type of runners,” said Ryder, Darcey’s son. “We have a bunch of tough runners. Whenever we get to hard courses like regionals and state that have a lot of hills, our guys eat that up. We’re tough. That’s how we run.”
Darcey’s M.O. when it comes to training is simplistic, with a shoot-for-the-moon nod.
“We expect our kids to show up every day and do our best,” Darcey said. “That doesn’t sound hard, but it’s so when we get into the competitions, we’re just doing the same thing that we do every other day. Everything we do is to try and develop them and progress year to year. There’s always another step to go as long as the kids have consistent, dedicated training and stay healthy.”
YOUTH IS SERVED
Five underclassmen, including three freshmen that finished in the top 20 at the regional meet, dot the Tigers’ girls lineup.
“Coming into this year, we were wondering how we were going to do,” Acopa said. “It’s nice knowing we’re going to be pretty good for the next few years, and that success will continue to improve.”
Guerrero is the only senior. She’s the leader now, the elder stateswoman. It’s a vast change from last season.
“It was definitely hard at first,” Guerrero said. “Last year, I was the youngest on a pretty old team. I didn’t understand the responsibility I would have as a leader until the summer. I’ve grown as a person, and I think they look up to me.”
They do. The younger girls rave about Guerrero and how she has shown them what it means to not only work hard, but how to work.
“She teaches us to show up every day,” Fish said. “It always feels like she does everything that she needs to be doing.”
Darcey said Guerrero is one of the toughest kids he’s ever coached.
“She’s a really tough competitor,” he said. “She made varsity as a sophomore, and from then on she just exploded. Her confidence grew. That’s the cool thing about cross country. Kids learn they can do things they didn’t know they could do.”
The freshman group is a resilient bunch. But it wasn’t always that way.
“I think our biggest growth is being confident in our toughness,” Torrey said. “At the beginning, we were scared to go fast, kind of. But we built up that confidence and now we know what we can do.”
Coming into this season, Darcey and Jason Reed, Darcey’s close friend and assistant of more than 10 years, knew the freshmen would be good.
This good, though? Maybe not.
“We have such high expectations for the kids, and they may have even surpassed those,” Darcey said. “Those three freshmen have such good mindsets and such good attitudes. So positive. They’ve been fresh air. They’ve obviously helped our team, but the camaraderie, too. They have fun with it, but they work their tail off.”
Not only are the freshmen competing against kids much older, but they are running 5K (3.1 miles) races, opposed to the mile-and-a-half runs they were doing in junior high.
“We were straight running on fields (in junior high), so this is very different,” Fish said. “You have to stay tougher through a longer race. A mile-and-a-half goes by pretty fast, so you don’t really have time to think. With a 5K, you really have to keep the negative thoughts out of your head and really work to keep pushing in the second and third miles.”
The group is buoyed by a bond that was already established. Fish and Torrey were classmates at Woodcreek Junior High, and Fish had raced Lester, who attended Katy Junior High.
“I think all three of us are able to push each other in practice and the races,” Lester said. “We keep each other accountable, and it makes it a lot easier to enjoy running and go faster.”
It’s made for a winning transition.
“They’re super competitive with each other and the rest of us,” Guerrero said of the freshmen. “They don’t hold themselves back, and that fits right in with us as a team.”
THE UNDERDOGS
It can be a challenge getting boys at Katy High to run cross country.
“So many of them play football,” Darcey said. “It’s harder to build numbers.”
Darcey was fortunate when Ryder took an interest in running. That got his friends involved, and now the Class of 2026 is leaving its mark.
“We’ve got a group of 4-5 junior boys that we’ve been working on for a long time,” Darcey said. “They were really good freshmen. As sophomores, we needed them and we were competitive and made the state meet. Those guys have taken another step, and they’re dedicated and motivated.”
Ryder is the leader. He was the District 19-6A champion, with a personal record of 15:00.26, and finished second at the regional meet in what he said was a disappointing showing.
Ryder said none of the boys performed well at the regional meet, leaving a chip on their shoulder going into Friday.
“Regionals wasn’t even our 100%,” Ryder said. “I’d say it was 70% because a lot of our guys had bad days because of the heat, not preparing for the race well. The biggest thing I learned is preparing my body in the days before, because I kind of neglected it a little bit. I wasn’t doing the stuff I needed to.
“So, we’re going into state trying to surprise people. People aren’t expecting us to contend for the podium, but I think we have a good shot.”
It’s an underdog mindset the Tiger boys are adopting.
“We want to show the whole state who we are,” Perez said.
The Tiger boys are more of a team this year. The workouts are more group oriented.
“Compared to other teams, I think we do really well moving as a team, whereas others might separate one by one, working on individual speed,” Perez said.
They’ve built up their speed from last year, focused more on bringing younger runners up to standard. Like the girls, the boys hold themselves accountable, something helped by their friendships off the track and course.
“When I first got here, I was a freshman running on varsity,” Ryder said. “We were a young team and couldn’t even make it out of district. As the years went by, last year was better. This year, we’re even better because we’ve had people developing and we’re figuring out how to race.”
‘NOT AFRAID OF ANYTHING’
If there is an underlying correlation between the boys and girls, it’s the willingness to work.
“It’s consistency,” Perez said. “Hard consistency. Every day, especially when you don’t want to, you have to get up and run, no matter the distance. It can be short, it can be long, but it has to be consistent, or else you can lose all your progress in 4-5 days.”
That ethos is driven home by Darcey, who, along with Reed, ran cross country and track and field at A&M Consolidated High and Texas A&M. Darcey is a competitor at heart. He is an aggressive, hands-on coach, consistently—there’s that word again—running alongside his athletes during morning practices.
“I kind of get annoyed when he runs with us because I know I’m going to have to run faster,” Fish said, laughing. “Our mileage is also high for a high school team. I think it’s just that he pushes us and he runs it with us. He’s not just one of those coaches who stands to the side and watches. If he does it, we know we can do it.”
The kids feed off Darcey’s work ethic and passion for the sport.
Acopa dropped a minute off her personal record this year. Guerrero didn’t think she was good enough as a freshman. Now she’s one of program’s premier talents.
Ryder doesn’t care for it when Darcey yells at him, but he knows it helps. There are minuses to having his dad as his coach, he said, but the plusses outweigh them all. He knows he will make him better.
Fourteen of the last 15 years, Darcey has sent at least one runner to state. Most of those years, he’s sent a team.
“This is the one sport you can change people,” Darcey said. “You can get somebody who comes in and has never run before and we can develop them into really good high school runners, and sometimes elite runners. We recruit hard to get as many kids out as possible, and we run faster and further to make competitions simple.”
Darcey has his teams train like they will race.
“Especially the paces that we go,” Acopa said. “Our workouts are about transferring that work to the courses that we’re going to be running on.”
So, the Tigers aren’t nervous heading into the state meet.
“We’ve been training for this all season,” Guerrero said.
Friday is what they’ve worked for. It’s what they’ve hurt for.
“We’re not afraid of anything,” Darcey said. “If we go out there and do our best, it’s going to be good. It may not be the best they’ve ever done, but it’s going to be pretty good or great because we work hard, we train hard.”
