Anchorage Daily News

FAIRBANKS -- Kailey Wilson is a freshman at tiny Kenny Lake High School with no teammates and no prior experience competing as a runner.

Heck, until last week she didn't even have a Kenny Lake running singlet.

What Wilson does have plenty of, however, is guts, talent and smarts, a combination that has made her a favorite on Saturday at the 1A-2A-3A state high school cross-country championships in Palmer.

Wilson's emergence and undefeated season has surprised her coach Jesse Heinbaugh and fellow competitors.

"Actually I just started competing this year. It was really a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing," Wilson said.

Wilson began running on July 30. She now trains five days a week, but it's not like she was a couch potato before.

"I'm in a lot of sports like basketball, volleyball and, during the summer, swimming and doing other things," Wilson said.

Her mom, Dee Dee, who ran cross country in high school in Owatonna, Minn., sometimes joins her on runs.

"She's living out my dream, you know," Dee Dee said. "She's just a natural at it."

A foreshadowing of Wilson's ability came during weekly one-mile runs in a middle school physical education class.

"The first four months of the year, not even any of the guys could touch her times. She was smoking everybody," Heinbaugh said.

Wilson's best 1-mile mark in eighth grade was 5 minutes, 54 seconds, but her coming-out-party for the rest of Alaska came Sept. 6 at the Palmer Invitational, which featured 1,200 runners from 45 schools. On the same Janecek Trails course that will be used for the state championships, Wilson passed Grace Christian's Mariah Applegate in the final 200 meters of the 5-kilometer 1A-2A-3A event to win by four seconds in 19:50.

"She just turned on the kick," said Heinbaugh, who was just hoping Wilson would make the top five. "You could see the pain on her face, but she pushed through."

And Wilson wasn't even racing on fresh legs. A day earlier, she won the freshmen-sophomore 3-K Anchorage Christian Schools Challenge.

"That was a huge weekend," Heinbaugh said, "an eye-opener. It got all the nerves out."

Other victories followed. She blew away the competition Saturday at the Region II championships at Su Valley High School, running 19:17 to win by 28 seconds.

Senior Heather Edic of Lathrop High and Christi Schmitz of North Pole were Wilson's chief victims. She led much of the first mile, then lurked a few seconds behind the pair before blowing past them near the end.

"She stayed enough away that we didn't even hear her," said Edic, the Region VI Class 4A champion. "We thought we had dropped her. She came out of nowhere. We had no idea she was there anymore."

Wilson won't sneak up on anyone on Saturday, though. With the exception of Haines' Stoli Lende, she's raced against all the top small schools runners this year.

Wilson's work ethic stands out, said Heinbaugh, who is also her English teacher and noted that she is a 4.0 student.

"She's the hardest-working girl around. She just doesn't give up," Heinbaugh said. "She has a lot of focus, a lot of guts, especially toward the end of a race."

Heinbaugh, who doesn't have a running background, trains with Wilson as often as possible and is challenged to keep up.

"It's kind of lonely, but it makes it easier," Wilson said. "It gives (Heinbaugh) more time to focus on just one person."

Kenny Lake is located in the Copper River Valley just south of Glennallen, and its K-12 school has an enrollment of about 130 students. Wilson hopes she'll have company in the future.

"I've had people come up to me and say that they want to do it next year," said Wilson, who will turn 15 on Oct. 10.

Wilson is drawing comparisons to Christy Virgin, who ran solo for Glennallen High and won the 1997 1A-2A-3A state championship by blazing 19:05 on the same Palmer course.

Virgin continued her career at Colorado State University and now lives in Minnesota. She still holds the course record in Palmer of 18:50, though Juneau's Leah Francis could eclipse that Saturday.

Rebecca McMahon of Glennallen also won a state cross-country title in 1999, but no runner from the Copper River Valley has won one since.

"It would be pretty awesome," Wilson said. "We've got a pretty good chance."

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