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“I can't imagine my life now without track,” Poly track star Ariana Washington says. “Track is everything.”
“I can’t imagine my life now without track,” Poly track star Ariana Washington says. “Track is everything.”
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Ariana Washington runs fast, sets her goals high and can tell you all about it in the time it takes her to set another record in the 200 meters.

“The thing about Ariana,” Poly track and field coach Don Norford says with a smile, “is that she loves to communicate. She doesn’t want to miss anything.”

That’s Washington. She talks fast and runs faster. She’s fully engaged in life, hot-wired to do things fast and fearlessly, whether it’s going after national records or telling you why she chose Oregon to further her education and boost her potential world-class track career. Supergirl strength, whether she’s running or talking.

“The first time I saw her she was a freshman on the basketball court,” Norford recalls. “I saw this girl going up and down the court. She was just blazing. I saw all the strength, the speed she had.

“I saw her nervous system was working superfast like a sprinter. I knew then this young lady was something special.”

His instincts were right on. The 5-foot-10 Washington, whose first love was basketball, quickly realized that her destiny was on the track, not the court. She adapted mentally and emotionally to the purity of track and field and embraced a sport she had once shied away from after being teased for being faster than the boys in grade school. She has become the standout on the current Poly track and has a brilliant future, presumably a few Olympic Games, in front of her.

“I loved basketball,” Washington says now. “Ball was life for me. In the eighth grade, my attitude was, ‘I don’t really like running, but I’m going to do it because I’m good at it.’ My freshman year, it was the same thing.

“Eventually, after I was told I could not go back to basketball, I started to fall in love with track. The more I realized I was good at track, the more I embraced it.

“I can’t imagine my life now without track. Track is everything.”

The move paid off immediately for Poly and Washington, who won 100- and 200-meter dash California state championships as a sophomore and junior while leading the team to second in 2012 and a title in 2013. Eventually, Norford believes, the move will yield similar results for Oregon and U.S.

“I look for her to do great things for our country,” Norford says. “The first step is Oregon. That’s a great program. I know she’ll fit in well up there.”

Norford insists he was never surprised by Washington’s rapid ascent to the top of the state as a mere sophomore. And he’s not surprised she kept right on working hard, not letting that early success change her work ethic at all.

“When I first talked to her, I knew this young lady was special,” he says. “She wasn’t talking like a 14-year-old. She seemed more like a 16- or 17-year-old. Very eloquent. Real confident.

“I learned later her family is highly educated. They’ve got doctors, lawyers, everybody.”

They don’t have any Olympic gold medalists, but Washington is working on that.

First, of course, there is that little matter of her senior year, which is just beginning. She doesn’t want to just go out on top, she wants to go out with a bang. A big bang, in Washington’s case, would be breaking the sea-level national records held by Angela Williams of Chino (11.11 in 1998) and Allyson Felix (22.52 2003).

“Yes, I’m very determined to get a national record,” Washington says. “It might be wind-aided, but that’s OK. I just want to be able to say I ran this time.

“I want to go 11.10 or .09 (in the 100). I have to go 22.5. I have to go 22-something, at least, or I’m going to be upset with myself. I have been chasing 22 for two years. I have to do it before I go to college.”

With much of the 2014 season still ahead of her, Washington’s all-time bests are 11.38 in the 100 (11.18 wind-aided) and 23.18 (23.05 wind-aided). Norford believes both those marks will come down in the next two months. Washington just returned from the Penn Relays where Poly’s 4×100 team ran 45.63, the fastest U.S. time so far this year.

“The talent is there,” he said “Not everyone knows that last year she had a nagging injury we had to work around. She was still able to do fantastic, but now she’s fully healed.

“We’re taking it easy with her right now. It’s a long season.”

Washington’s approach now is bigger than Poly’s next dual meet, or even the CIF and state championships.

“My freshman year I touched my talent. I broke out my sophomore year. I’m grateful to win state that year. It wasn’t easy, but I pulled it off,” Washington said. “After that, my goals just kept getting bigger and bigger.

“Now I’m more on a level where it’s not so much state or even national. I’m working for worlds (juniors, this year). I’m thinking more as a college freshman. So that way when I get to Oregon, it won’t be such a big hit to me.”

Washington obviously had her choice of going to college just about anywhere. Oregon, she says, wasn’t even her first choice. Eventually, however, all of Oregon’s built-in appeal to a track athlete – Eugene is known as TrackTown USA and its on target to host the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials – made Washington’s choice obvious to her.

“It came down to between Oregon and Miami,” Washington says. “Then I said to myself, ‘Oregon wins championships.’ It would be hard to go to a team that doesn’t win coming from Poly, a team that wins every single year.

“Track is so huge up there. It’s different than anywhere else. Track comes first. So one morning I woke up and I realized it was ‘Go, Ducks!’”

With an infectious smile, Washington adds there was one other little reason: “Phil Knight asked about me. If the owner of Nike asked about me, I have to go.”

Fortunately for Poly’s 2014 track team, it will be another few months before Washington settles down in Eugene. Come June, Ariana will be going for a record of a different sort.

“Marion Jones (also a state champion as a sophomore) has the record for most state titles (nine),” Washington says. “When I defend my 100 and 200 this year, I’ll have six individual. If we win the 4×100 and I compete on the 4×400 and we win that, I’ll have nine.

“Nine’s enough.”

After state come the world junior championships, an event Washington qualified for last year without winning in either the 100 or 200. That was hardly a failure, considering she was only 16, but she clearly wants to be at her best this time around.

“What happened last year was I peaked for CIF state, but when worlds came around I was tired; I was exhausted,” Washington says. “Of course I want to run fast in CIF and state, but I really want to do big things at world. That’s the big goal this year.

“I tell my coach, ‘Set my training calendar for July 17.’ I need to be ready to run around 22.5, 22.6 right about then.”

Washington smiles as she divulges her ambitious plans for 2014. It’s not as important as it might sound. Washington wants to max out her potential in a sport she has come to love, but she’s still a regular high school student on most days.

“Ariana is a special young lady, a very engaging person,” Norford says. “She loves people. She has a giving heart, a very compassionate heart.

“She thinks big, but she is not big-headed. She’s a hard worker and a good teammate, a leader.”

Washington hopes that someday there will be a Poly runner approaching or breaking her records, not to mention the times run by Poly’s other all-time great female sprinter, Shalonda Solomon, who clocked 11.35 and 22.82 in the sprints in 2004.

“I try to lead, show them if you work hard and believe in yourself anything is possible,” she says. “I try to keep them away from the high school drama, keep everybody’s heads on straight.

“Now that I’m a senior I try to focus on the younger girls. I try to tell them, ‘I want you to be better than me, make better decisions.’”

Assuming Washington stays healthy, her senior season should be a good indicator of how great her potential is on the national and international scale.

She’s actually a young senior who won’t be 18 until after she graduates from high school. And she’ll be joining a talented sprint corps at Oregon that should bring out the best in her at workouts even as she matures into an adult athlete.

“She has grown since she’s been here,” Norford says. “She wasn’t one of those athletes who are unusually mature at a young age. She’s still maturing into a woman. She’s going to reach her full strength when she’s about 20, 21.

“That’s right around Olympic time.”

Contact the writer: jimthomas@lbregister.com