Darr's double gave Frontier state team title; Schwartz capped storybook career
| Friday, Jun 26 2009 11:15 PM
Last Updated Friday, Jun 26 2009 11:23 PM
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All area athletes Matt Darr, from Frontier High and Chris Schwartz of Foothill High.
Casey Christie / The Californian All area athletes Chris Schwartz, of Foothill High and Matt Darr of Frontier High.
One did it with brawn and blunt objects, the other with speed and iron will.
But however they got there, Frontier junior Matt Darr and Foothill senior Chris Schwartz have one very important thing in common: They're both California state track and field champions.
They also are both Californian Athletes of the Year, honored for the remarkable accomplishments during the state finals June 6 in Clovis.
Darr won the shot put, the discus and a share of the state team title, all by himself. He threw personal records in both events that day, 192 feet in the discus and 62-1.25 in the shot.
Darr said his timely performance really started started with preliminaries the day before.
"I only took two throws, and then I was able to shut it down (because he was already qualified for the final)," Darr said. "It's a confidence booster. I knew I was going to open with a solid throw in the finals, and I just built on that and just competed well."
What was unexpected was that Darr's two victories, each worth 10 team points, was enough to vault Frontier into a four-way tie for the boys state title -- even though the Titans didn't have a single other boys competitor.
Schwartz took to the track much later in the event, but his performance was just as monumental in the 3,200-meter race. He ran a personal-best 8:51.60, the third-best high school time in the nation this year, to win an extremely fast race in which seven runners clocked sub-9:00 times.
According to DyeStat's list, seven of the top 13 times in the event came in that race. And Schwartz beat them all, out-kicking Collin Jarvis of Rancho Buena Vista by a couple of seconds. Schwartz's time was three-tenths of a second behind the leading national time of the year.
"It was fun," said Schwartz, who was the 2007 CIF Cross Country Division I state champion. "I was a little scared because I didn't know what to expect, but I trusted in myself and took off."
Each athlete's story had a few twists and turns before they reached the state finals.
Darr has been a standout since his days in middle school -- at least if you ask his throwing coach, Dawn Dumble, who met him when he was in her seventh-grade class.
"The first week of school, a girl has an asthma attack," Dumble said. "She had just come from P.E. and didn't have her inhaler. And I recall immediately telling Matt to take her to the office. It was the first week, but I instinctually knew he was more responsible than the other kids. It was crazy."
At the time, Darr was into baseball, but Dumble, a former national champion thrower at UCLA, got him to go out for the track team, too. He took to it, and Dumble began training him regularly.
"But I could only work with him once or twice a week," said Dumble, who had (still has) two small children at home. "So I'd just write up a schedule for him and meet and have him do the drills on his own. It takes a special type of kid for that to work."
Dumble and Darr have kept that system in place throughout Darr's high school career, and he's continued to get better and better, reaching the state meet in the shot put as a sophomore. Another roadblock to his success presented itself this year, though.
Darr's future lies in football, where recruiting services rank him one of the nation's best punters. That means this year was full of recruiting e-mails, text messages, call and visits.
"I didn't get on the (football) radar until January or February," Darr said. "At the time, I was full-bore on track, looking to do good things. But all the attention was on recruiting. It was definitely a challenge trying to balance it out.
"There were days where I'd check my e-mail and have six different e-mails from six different schools. Then the whole time at (track) practice, I'd be thinking about how I was going to respond to the e-mails."
Finally, five days before the state meet, Darr verbally committed to USC. That wiped away a bunch of distractions.
"Then I got to focusing on state," Darr said. "I spent days with Dawn throwing, and said I'm going to stop and focus on track. And it paid off."
Meanwhile, Schwartz was riding his own roller coaster of a year. A foster child who was abandoned as a youth by his mother at a mental hospital, Schwartz committed to Cal Poly late in the year after meeting all academic requirements, and then ran his two best races of the season at the section meet (9:20.22) and the state final.
The section effort was Schwartz's best time of the year to that point, partly because he hadn't run against much top competition and partly because he thrives on being pushed.
"I just think he wants it more than anybody," said Foothill track coach Arron Rietz, who said the school's distance coach, Paul Contreras, also deserves credit for his speed work with Schwartz.
He certainly wanted it more than anyone at state, where Schwartz came in as an underdog -- his times didn't look good on paper -- but said he was buoyed by that fact.
"I was kind of happy that there was no pressure on me to win," he said. "It was a relaxing race."
