Having grown up among gangs and drugs of north Denver, Miguel Cazares says he owes his life to a straight-talking, pony-tailed veterinarian who has coached the cross country team at troubled North High School since 1992.
“I would never have thought I’d be running right now,” said Cazares, who graduated from North in 2005. “I could have been dropping out of school like most of the kids at North. I could have been maybe selling drugs like most of the kids that graduate from North and don’t have a life – be in prison, can’t hold a job, stuff like that.
“He really looks out for us. That’s all he’s been doing, saving good people’s lives. He sees they have potential.”
Oscar Ponce also credits North coach Jeff Young with helping him stay on the right path. As does Mauro Martinez.
They don’t even want to think about where they’d be if not for Young, a former military brat and rugby player who grew up with an admittedly naive middle-class world view that clashed with reality at North.
Ponce ran for the University of Colorado after graduating from North in 1995 and received a master’s degree in education this year from Boston University. He recently went to work as a parent and family liaison for the Denver Public Schools, determined to help others the way Young helped him.
When Martinez was a freshman at North, he habitually ditched classes. He never gave college a thought. Now a senior, he wants to run for a college team and someday compete in the Olympics.
Cazares, meanwhile, shocked observers at the Colfax Marathon in May by finishing third in his first marathon at age 19 with a time of 2 hours, 53 minutes, 44 seconds. He is attending the Community College of Denver and hopes to run for a college team after resolving eligibility issues.
A 12-person team comprised of Young, Ponce, Cazares, Martinez, other North grads and current North runners won last month’s Wild West Relay, a 195-mile race from Fort Collins to Steamboat Springs that attracted more than 90 teams.
They all say Young and his posse of runners are like a family. When Young attempted to run the Leadville Trail 100-mile race two weeks ago (he dropped out with an injury at 50 miles) many were there to support him.
“Running to me is like a religion,” said Young, who is 50. “When I’m out there by myself, I feel like it’s God in me. I work hard, but I’ve been blessed, and I just feel like I need to share that. I personally think everybody’s obligated to it.”
Young is an idealist, but he’s not a dreamer. When kids come out for the team, he tells them running for him will be the hardest thing they do in high school. He doesn’t waste much time on them until they prove they’re tough enough to stick with it.
“Poor families aren’t ever going to move up if we give them a poor education and if we don’t demand from them,” Young said. “I think that’s the biggest thing I bring to this team: I demand, and I don’t understand why you wouldn’t.”
At first, coaching at North was a culture shock.
“I was the first person who ever told them they should go to college and really emphasized that,” Young said. “I just thought everyone grew up thinking that. I had that can-do attitude, but it was not because I was gung-ho. I’m not a cheerleader kind of person – in fact, quite the opposite. It was just a matter of practicality to me. It’s just what you do: You try your best, shoot for being the best, and you go to college. You get a good education, you go out and work in the real world. I thought that’s the way everybody viewed the world. It took me awhile to figure out that’s not quite how everybody views the world.”
That’s especially true at North, a school seemingly fighting for its very survival.
“There’s poverty. There’s single-parent families. There’s kids who are homeless,” Ponce said. “Jeff set up a haven for us to come in and try to do something with our lives. There’s drugs; there’s heavy gang activity.
“If it wasn’t for running, I would have probably gone that way. There’s something about society that tells Latino males that this (gangs and drugs) is what we do. We kind of buy into that, unless you find a haven, something like the cross country team that Jeff was able to create – and we all created.”
Keeping the faith
One former North runner, Hector Moreno, got an engineering degree at CU. Julio Bonilla is a freshman runner at the University of Miami. Esmeralda Martinez and Samantha Towne are running for Mesa State.
Cazares hopes he will be able to run for a college team, too. When he began running for Young, he cared about school only insofar as it kept him eligible for running. Young convinced him education needed to be his top priority, then running.
“There’s so much stuff going on,” Cazares said of North. “It can ruin your life – not going to class, ditching, hanging out on 32nd. When you graduate you’d be working at a McDonald’s or Burger King, stuff that you don’t want for your kids. When I found the team, it was a relief because I was actually good at running.”
Cazares wants to major in international business, travel around the world, make big financial deals. He wants to come back to North and help Young, the way Ponce has, and his stunning performance in the Colfax Marathon suggests he might have the talent to compete with the elites.
“Faith is the hardest thing in the world, and if you believe in something, you do it,” said Cazares, who has a full-time job at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. “If you don’t, then you’re mediocre and you don’t do nothing in your life, just be a loser. I don’t want to be in that situation. I want my kids to have what I didn’t have. I want to give my kids a better life. Running changed my life completely.”
A positive diversion
Martinez is convinced he would have dropped out long ago if it hadn’t been for Young. Martinez felt the team relying on him, too, and didn’t want to let them down.
“It kept my grades up because I wanted to stay in running,” Martinez said. “It also kept me out of trouble from gangs or anything that wasted the time of my day so I wouldn’t do anything else bad. I would just stay in running after school.
“When I get home, I eat and go to sleep.”
Young’s extended family of runners is an alternative to the gangs, providing another sense of belonging.
“A gang provides that family, that unity,” said Ponce. “We’re our own little gang. We’re a positive gang that is about success and is about looking forward and seeing how we can better ourselves. There are a lot of barriers, but those can be overcome. It’s just a matter of having some people who want to do some work.”
Staff writer John Meyer can be reached at 303-954-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com.Para leer este artículo en español, vaya a denverpost.com/aldia
