Albert Caruana of Cross Country Express asked me if he could interview me for his site.
This is how it came out.
From Albert. For those of you that are familiar with his stats work, Jim has been keeping stats since his junior high years, and eventually, his site became the home to all stats related to the Redwood Empire area which includes all the high schools in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake counties. Currently, you can find all of his work at this link https://redwoodempirerunning.com/. Personally, I became familiar with Jim’s site when my team was competing in the NCS Class A meet in the early to mid-2000s before we moved to CCS. The NCS Class A meet includes teams from the Redwood Empire. Although it was not many years ago, a lot of those results were not readily available except on Jim’s site.
1) What was your athletic background? What sports did you play before high school?
I started sports in elementary school with Little League baseball and youth soccer. I did both of those into High School.
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I need to thank my parents for always supporting me. They were at pretty much every sporting event I ever did and then again with my children.
I began Track & Field in 7th grade. My first mentor for both track and stats was my Junior High coach John Gash. He had one of the best ways of getting kids to come out for the sport which you can read all about here:
How I was recruited to the sport of Track & Field
2) Any lasting memories from your high school career and proudest accomplishments? Did you do any sports/activities after high school and beyond?
I was a scrawny kid in grade school, I could almost hide behind my vaulting pole. But I absolutely loved competing, especially against myself. I was always trying to set a PR in whatever I was doing. Of course I had to keep stats to know this. I graduated from Montgomery High in 1978 and the level of High School Track and Field in the Redwood Empire was incredible back in that time period.
At one point I actually looked at our All-Time top 50 list to compare years and I was surprised to find that my senior year had the most top 50 marks.
See those stats here:
Boys Season Rankings by Marks
I ran cross country my junior and senior year and fell in love with that sport as well.
There were always better pole vaulters than myself in my area that I competed against and my senior year began with an ankle sprain, foolishly playing basketball at lunch time, which cost me the first 4 weeks of practice. But I worked out as hard as I could and surprised pretty much everyone but myself by winning the North Bay League pole vault title at 13-6. Just missed going to state as I was in a jump-off for the final state berth. After high school I competed at the Santa Rosa Junior College where I was league champ again at 15-0. My highest vault ever came for the SRJC in a decathlon where I cleared 15-7.25.
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The following year I spent teaching PE at a private school and decided to go to Sonoma State University to become a teacher and do track. SSU had no other vaulters so it made practicing extremely difficult and I ended up spending more time on the decathlon getting myself over the 6,000 point mark.
One fun thing about back then was the San Francisco Cow Palace still put on an indoor track meet that I got to vault in for SSU.
One very special memory I have is from the 2011 Viking Track Classic when I was honored with a plaque for my years of service with my daughter beside me who was competing I the meet.
3) Who were the adults/teachers/coaches that you feel had the biggest impact on you?
I have already mentioned John Gash and my parents but my JC coaches, Pat Ryan and my vault coach Jim McCray played a big part in my development.
4) How did the running stat collecting for the redwood empire start? What were your sources when you got started?
See below.
5) I remember those stats being posted on a newspaper site. How did that connection come about? Did you post all the stats on a previous site?
I’m going to answer questions 4&5 together.
I got into stats back in Junior High thanks in a big part to Gash who had boys who were breaking USA age group records.
I continued do stats through college, helping the SRJC update their records and at SSU I pretty much created their top 10 lists as they had almost nothing at the time.
In 1985 I got a part time job at The Press Democrat newspaper doing the filing of stories and photos for the sports department. This eventually became full time and I was there until 2007.
There might not be a Redwood Empire Running without Herb Dower
Dower had a good start on the records for high school Track & Field for the Redwood Empire and I quickly started adding to it as I then had access to all their old stories.
Here is something I did about my research including mega hours spent on a microfilm machine, clip files and the internet.
How do I come up with this historical stuff?
I brought a proposal to The Press Democrat to do a running website for them and began my site on the internet for the PD during the 2002 Track season.
It was called www.northbay.com/running
After I left the PD in 2007 I continued to do the website.
During the 2011 cross country season the PD made me switch from northbay.com to a blog.
https://running.blogs.pressdemocrat.com
I did not like the new format as much but I had no choice.
Then just days before the 2015 NCS MOC cross country finals, with NO WARNING, they cut off my access to the site and when I asked what was going on they said they had decided to stop doing many of the blogs they were doing. I couldn’t even put up anything on the site to let my viewers know what was going on.
The PD got a lot of angry calls from coaches about that.
6) You ended up having to move all your data to your current site. How difficult was that transition and was there any thought about not going forward to a new site?
I couldn’t imagine not continuing to do the site so I did some research and got set up with godaddy.com and had a site up for the 2016 track season.
I went from getting paid by the PD for doing the site to getting donations from viewers and am happy to say I have a small number but good people who have helped me financially over the years.
I basically spent any free time I had between the end of 2015 and the start of the 2016 track season getting the skeleton of the site up and have just added kept adding since then.
7) Now that you have the new site running, what has been easier for you and what has been more difficult on the new site?
When the site was hosted by The Press Democrat I had some technical help from their web department. With my move it all became a one man show. I have very limited internet coding skills and less than adequate writing skills. You will, I’m afraid, find many grammatical errors in my stories. Just had to look up how to spell grammatical.
One of the most difficult parts is finding the time to do all that I want to. First off everything on my site is added manually. Nothing is automated so every change, for example, to the prep best lists. Is done by hand. During the day I have a full time job. Since 2014 I have been driving buses for Mendocino Transit Authority. My wife spends most of her time on our goat ranch, https://sonviewranch.com/, which I help out with. This leaves me doing most of my website time work at night, often past midnight.
When the Napa schools decided to come back to the NCS, in the 2018/2019 school year, our section decided to add a new league, the Vine Valley Athletic League (VVAL). For those that don’t know the Redwood Empire has some of the oldest schools in the state. Petaluma, opened in 1873, Ukiah and Santa Rosa 1875. They are three of the oldest high schools in all of California. Santa Rosa was the 9th high school chartered in the state’s history.
Healdsburg came along shortly after in 1880 with Sonoma Valley 1895 and Analy 1909 all starting well before the North Bay Track League (1921) or the State meet (1915) were formed.
History of Redwood Empire track leagues
A Brief History of the NCS and CIF
This left me with a dilemma. As mentioned everything I do on my site is by hand. So the thought of adding another league to all I do was a real challenge for me. But with schools like Petaluma being moved to the new league there was no way I could just abandon them so my site expanded to include the VVAL.
8) During your time collecting all the stats, who are the athletes/teams that stick out for you as most memorable?
Some I never even met like Healdsburg’s Ralph Rose who went on to win three Olympic gold medals.
Being from Montgomery Mel Gray, double state meet champion and national record breaker has always been the talk of the town.
Petaluma’s Dan Aldridge had his high school career end just as mine was being.
Competing with and coaching with Deanne Neff.
Covering Santa Rosa’s Julia Stamps.
Watching the amazing come from behind finishes of Montgomery’s Sara Bei.
Teamwise I was competing myself during the time Piner’s Jimmy Underhill had some super teams in both sports including being ranked #1 in California and 2nd Nationally in both the 2- and 3-mile postal meets in 1976.
Montgomery’s Larry Meredith 2000 state champion cross country team.
And the incredible run that the Maria Carrillo teams are still having under Greg Fogg and former coach Dan Aldridge.
These are some that immediately come to mind.
9) Out of all the stats that you have collected, what are the ones that amaze you and might never be surpassed?
I used to think there were marks that would never be beaten but not anymore.
We have had some pretty great girls distance runners early on. We had NCS MOC Champions, Sherri Minkler, Nika Horn, Dana Flint, Lori Shanoff, Julie Ruiz, Kathy Dalton, Jennifer Bocca and Jeannise Eisenman to name a few. Then came Julia Stamps who demolished everything any of them had ever done, and was a National Champion. After that I thought we would never have a girl come even close to Stamps’ marks. WRONG. First came Sara Bei then Amber Trotter and now we currently we have currently have Hanne Thomsen running times like 9:55.31. And it’s not enough that Thomsen is only getting ready to start her junior year but now Stamps’ own daughter, Ashlin Mallon, could possibly move into that stratosphere as she enters her freshman year.
On the boys side we have some marks that seem nearly as incredible like Mel Gray’s LJ 25-7¼/20.7 220y/9.4 100y, Dennis DeSoto SP 63-10½, Steve Guerrini 2000m Steeplechase 5:43.9.
Redwood Empires Greatest High School Male Track and Cross Country Athletes
10) The upkeep of your site takes time and effort. How could people out there help support your site?
I have a real gap of missing results for these seasons.
2001 Cross Country
2001 Track & Field
2000 Cross Country
2000 Track & Field
1999 Cross Country
You can see what I do have for those seasons here.
If anyone has old clippings of Redwood Empire meets for any of these I could use them. jimcrowhurst@comcast.net
I hate having to ask for financial help but that always helps.
11) What is the most satisfying part of what you do with your site?
It’s always nice when people tell me how much they like the site and how it is their go-to place to see what is happening but what really gets me excited is when I think of some brand new list/story to do that I have never done before. I will jump into working on one of those finding old facts or whatever and am probably more excited to see how it comes out than I think many of my readers are.
12) Anything else you would like to add or share?
My former classmate Matt Malvino asked me to help him coach track and cross country at Montgomery. I spent about 14 years coaching track there, mostly the vault. One of the years I was head coach when the others needed a break. One of my joys was getting to be one of the people who got to coach Amy Bei and Nate Guido. Amy is the older sister to Sara Bei. They both qualified for state in 1998. Sara won both the 1600 & 3200 at state that year while Amy took 8th. At the NCS Redwood Area meet both the vaulters took first with Amy clearing 11-1. Amy was only 4-11 tall and I have always wondered if that might be some type of state record for a girl under 5 feet tall.
I started two Invitationals during my years at Montgomery. The North Coast Track Extravaganza, a meet with none of the standard 16 events but all the non-standard ones like 3 person field event relays, pentathlon, shuttle hurdles, college weights, 4Xmile relay and so on. This is where Steve Guerrini broke the national record in the 2000m Steeplechase in 5:43.9 in 1991 that lasted until 2014.
The other meet was the Viking Track Classic which just had its 32nd annual meet.
I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if I had not gotten hooked on all this.