GIRLS CROSS COUNTRY PREVIEW
By LANDON NEGRI
STAFF WRITER
FRANK BELLINO, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Hemet girls cross country coach A.J. Plinski makes the girls PR cookies, a practice started by their late coach Janice Kelley, who passed away eight months ago due to cancer. Kelley liked to reward runners for setting personal records. She would make the tasty rewards herself.
HEMET › The scene is almost all too familiar.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon at Hemet High School. The south edge of campus, next to the baseball field, is abuzz with activity. Runners stretch, warm up and some seek refuge in the shade during a typical miserable August heat wave in the San Jacinto Valley.
Everything is in place – even those tasty PR cookies. Everything, that is, except Janice Kelley.
“I even now miss Janice every single day,” Hemet cross country coach A.J. Plinski said.
It has now been eight months since Kelley died suddenly after a well-hidden battle with cancer. She wasn’t just Hemet’s cross country coach; she was Hemet distance running, starting with her own success as Title IX began in the 1970s – when she was a twotime Division 2A champion in the 3,200 meters in track – to leading two consecutive boys teams to top-five finishes in the state in the mid-1990s.
Plinski counted Kelley as a mentor and one of his closest friends, and he’s helped her coach off and on since 1992. His hiring was obvious to keep continuity in a program – particularly with the girls, who are eyeing a rebound in the Mountain Pass League and perhaps the first CIFSouthern Section Finals appearance in recent memory.
Kelley’s death – she was in her mid-50s – came as a shock. She made a habit of running with her teams and had done so last year, right up until the season ended in November. No one knew she was ill, including her runners, who found out their coach had passed when they returned from Christmas break.
“My friend Kate turned to me and said, ‘Ashley, Coach Kelley died,’” said senior Ashley Ramos, the Bulldogs girls’ top returner. “And it was just like, ‘Wow.’ It was a lot to take in and hard to believe, because Coach would run with us. Coach was healthy.”
Said senior Natalia Garcia: “She was a very dedicated runner and probably one of the strongest girls that I knew. She dedicated her life to her runners, cross country, and to Hemet and teaching at Hemet High.”
What followed, after grief waned, was what you could call an inspirational slam dunk.
A group of Hemet runners approached Plinski, who also teaches history at Hemet, asking him to coach. Kelley had gotten him into running back in the early 1990s and, in fact, the two ran the Boston Marathon in 1995. With his duties involving the school’s athletic decathlon reduced, he agreed and enjoyed coaching the distance runners in track last season.
Coaching cross country was, as he put it, a no-brainer.
“It never even crossed my mind that Janet would pass,” he said of Kelley, whose family owned a citrus ranch on the east side of town for decades. “It would just be Janice’s program; it’s been her program forever. She was 56. I figured even if she retired from teaching, she’ll just coach and work at the ranch. I wouldn’t even think about it until she was 60.
“I never even thought I’d be the head coach. But then when the kids asked. I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do distance for track.’ We had a great season. They’re incredible kids. It wasn’t hard at all to make the decision to then commit and put all the time in for cross country.”
So there he was, leading practice on a hot August day. It’s a bit of a strange scene without Kelley, but somewhat familiar by the presence of her popular “PR cookies” she made as a reward for particularly strong performances by her runners. Somewhere along the way, Plinski got his hands on a recipe only slightly less guarded than the Colonel’s own herbs and spices.
His girls team finished what Plinski termed as a “stinging” third place last year in the Mountain Pass League. Ramos was the highest finisher in 10th place at the league finals at Diamond Valley.
All of the Bulldogs starters return this season.
Sights will be set on Mountain Pass runner-up West Valley and perennial champ Beaumont. And with Plinski, who has continued Kelley’s philosophy and workout routines, it will be as if her hand is still on the program.
She’s had that effect on Ramos, who has rededicated herself.
“How dedicated she was to running made you just as dedicated to running,” said Ramos, her voice cracking. “She definitely impacted me a lot.”
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