This guest post is by Doug Petrick, a member of HSRC, and the boys and girls track and cross country coach at Upper St. Clair High School, in Pennsylvania.

If you follow high school running, no doubt, you’ve heard of American Fork High School, coming straight out of Utah. This past spring, American Fork’s 4x1600m boys relay team smashed the National Federation of High School’s previous record by over 10 seconds! When you do the math with their record time of 16:41.30 for the event, it works out to 4 minutes and 10 seconds for each 1600m split leg!   

In fall 2015, American Fork finished second as a team at Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) and had the individual boy’s champion. This past fall, American Fork repeated as the second overall team at NXN and had three runners in the top 10 individually- along with the individual winner in the boy’s race. This is quite the model of successful high school distance running, and the coach orchestrating all this success is Timo Mostert.   [Read more…]