Tell-all delves into Newbury Park’s running success

On the night before the national championship our team had been building toward for five years, there was only one thing left to do.

- BY SEAN BROSNAN, ANDREW GREIF AND CHRIS LEAR

NEWBURY PARK senior Nico Young competes on the Riverside City Cross-Country Course in 2019.

Buy a tent.

It was December 3, 2021. The boys of California’s Newbury Park High School cross country squad, the top-ranked high school cross country team in the United States, were eating a carb-loading dinner at an Airbnb in Huntsville, Alabama. The next morning, at a park in the city, was the RunningLane Cross Country Championships. Months earlier, when a meet in Oregon that had long determined the best team of distance runners in the United States had been canceled over COVID-19 concerns, coaches such as me had scrambled to find another race to settle who was the nation’s best. The best teams agreed that RunningLane would be this season’s new de facto title stage.

The runners, their parents, and I arrived in Huntsville two days before the race, and since we'd left Newbury Park, our Los Angeles suburb, I'd gone through a mental checklist to make sure we had everything we'd need on race day.

We had experience.

This national meet would not be our first.

We had speed.

"BEYOND FAST" by Sean Brosnan, Chris Lear and Andrew Greif.

Any one of our top four runners — senior Colin Sahlman, who had a laid-back surfer personality and an explosive closing kick; his younger brother Aaron, a junior with huge potential but inconsistent; and twin juniors Lex and Leo Young, the younger brothers of a national champion, who had become stars on and off the track because of their speed and social media presence — could have been the best runner on any other team in the country.

We had the attention of the running world.