When the school year is over, many prep athletes attend summer sports camps to learn and improve their game. Summer basketball teams play up to 30 games, football teams play in passing leagues and like volleyball hold camps, wrestlers compete in Greco-Roman and other competitions, soccer like swimming has camps and competition, baseball and softball have plenty of games, but what about the runners? They don’t just run to stay in shape. Marshfield cross country coach Steve Delgado likes to take his team to Steens Mtn. Running Camp, founded by a former South Coast prep coach. Harland Yriarte runs the camp. While at Brookings-Harbor his teams were some of the top in Oregon winning state titles in 1975 & 1978, his Bruins were also runners-up in 1976. Yriarte went on to Lane Community College in Eugene, eventually retiring as athletic director, but still maintaining the camp he started 42-years ago 7,000-feet up a mountain in Central Oregon. Steen’s offers not only high-altitude training, but a chance for teams to bond together while camping out for a week with other teams of runners. Delgado says he took seven runners this year with him for the first week of the camp. There were about 180 runners attending that first week, covering some six states. The Pirate runners & their families worked all year to raise money to pay for the trip. While running each day, the campers also take on a 28 mile hike/run that ventures up to 9,500 feet above sea level, or where they are most use to running. “As a coach I believe Steens offers a “special sauce” to building championship caliber XC teams. It was important to me that the Marshfield program become part of the story there as I look to build on the success of our program. The number of State titles represented in the coaches who attend Steens with their teams is staggering. Steens does not make you a champion but champions attend Steens. It is these extra things the best runners in the State are doing all summer to run those fast times in the fall.” Bandon and Siuslaw also had teams at Steen’s for the first week.
