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Wanted: A track that's usable Patches in the track's surface and rocks from crumbling retaining walls are just a few of the obstacles Ashland High School runners face when training at the school. [Daily Tidings / Denise Baratta] Wednesday May 3, 2017 at 2:00 AM Joe Zavala Ashland Daily Tidings @Joe_Zavala99 As an assistant coach for the Nike Oregon Project, Pete Julian has to spend a certain amount of time in the air, flying back and forth from this training facility to that race and back again. And one of the things he likes to do to pass the time is look out the window and scan the earth below for those familiar oval-shaped beacons of sacrifice which became his homes away from home as a star distance runner at Ashland High School long before they became the source of his livelihood. Occasionally, his travels take him over southern Oregon, and when he looks out the window here he’s always a little perturbed by what he sees: several modern, red tracks surfaced with durable, high-performance polyurethane and, sticking out to Julian like a ripe cold sore on the chin, at least one old-school latex rubber track. Zoom in, and the picture of Robert W. Julian Track and Field — named after Pete Julian’s dad — only gets worse. Loose asphalt is scattered across its surface, which is peppered with divots, and small tufts of grass have pushed through cracks that cut into lanes like rivulets. Worse, the foundation and retaining wall are failing and consequently the track has gone wonky — and uphill slog here, a downhill freefall there. “Just about every school in southern Oregon has got a beautiful track,” said Julian, who helped Ashland claim the 1988 AAA boys state cross country championship before going on to become University of Portland’s first All-American and later, in 1999, a Pan American Games bronze medalist. “So why is it that one of the best distance program and track and field programs in the state that’s always awesome and in a great community that’s supportive of athletics, why do we never have a facility? I don’t get it. Why is it that when I’m flying over southern Oregon I don’t see that little red circle down there, ever? Why does Medford have all these red tracks, and Phoenix, and all these other places up and down the I5 corridor? No matter where you go there are these beautiful facilities, but why is it the one place that’s really known for its running, outside of maybe Eugene, doesn’t have something that honors that legacy? “It makes no sense to me. We can do this. It is a lot of money, but at the same time it’s a worthy investment and it’s something that I think really will make a massive impact for our young men and women. I want to be a part of that and I think other people should too.” Julian is part of a group of parents, alumni and community members who have joined forces in an effort to raise $500,000 to restore the track surface and its foundation. They’re about halfway to the finish line after an anonymous $100,000 pledge was called in last week and the goal according to Jim Williams, one of the effort’s three co-leaders (the others are Julian and Neil Holland), is to raise the money and begin construction in time to host an event there in 2018. That’s something AHS, wary of safety concerns, hasn’t been able to do the past two seasons. A “Restore Ashland Track” GoFundMe page (www.GoFundMe.com/AshlandTrack) was set up about three weeks ago but had only raised $4,665 of its stated $235,000 goal as of Tuesday evening. The track’s black rubber surface, the firmness of which fluctuates based on the air temperature, was standard issue for high school tracks when it was installed in 1991, but it hasn’t been resurfaced since 2003 and is considered by Ashland’s coaches well beyond its useful life. The Ashland High track and field team, which carries 100 student-athletes, still uses the dilapidated track for practice sparingly, but only because SOU’s track is off limits (there’s not enough room there for two programs, Williams explained) and setting up a dinner-time practice at the Ashland Middle School track, where AMS student-athletes practice after school, has proven impractical. There’s no way to tell how many more practices Robert W. Julian Track & Field can take, but as he works the phones chasing donations, Williams, who’s a volunteer coach at AHS who used to coach the sport in the Bay Area, doesn’t sound too optimistic that his freshmen twin sons will be able to practice there much in the near future unless something is done soon. “It’s like an ice storm away from unusable,” he said. “People just don’t know that the track is a wreck, and they don’t know that the school doesn’t have any money to do anything about it. So I think our first job is to tell everybody, 'look, this track is a wreck and we’re going to have to take it on our shoulders to clean it up.' “There’s a lot of facility work to do in terms of retaining walls, foundation work, drainage and the surface of the infield for jumps and things like that. If we’re successful at this, what we’ll end up with is sort of a two-phase project, one where we re-install the track and the foundation and then we come back a couple years later and start to do it right, start to add stands and a new scoreboard.” Williams added that the group’s motives for replacing the track go beyond providing local athletes with a home facility they can be proud of. Also on their minds, he said, is honoring the legacy of the Julian family, particularly Bob Julian, the track’s namesake who retired from coaching in 2001 before being lured back briefly on an interim basis in 2008. The family’s patriarch led the Ashland boys cross country team to three state titles and the Ashland girls team to two runner-up finishes, and his son, Bob Julian Jr., coached the girls to the program’s most recent state title in 2006. For Pete Julian, Ashland’s top placer on the 1988 state championship team, rebuilding the track is personal. “We need to honor that legacy,” he said. Julian remembers the hundreds of former AHS alums who filed into an auditorium to thank Bob Julian at his retirement celebration, and memories of the Julian household circa 1988, alive with teenage energy and always bouncing (Bob Julian had an open-door policy), is rendered even more vividly in his retelling. “The fridge was full, the door was open,” Pete Julian said with a laugh. “Every night of the week we had people coming through that household — maybe if a kid got in a little bit of trouble, or was going through some hard things, had to stay over a week. My mom would always be like, ‘I’m not going to make you something but you know where the fridge is.’ There were always kids sleeping on the floor. If anybody needed to talk, my dad was always there, all the time.” Julian argues that a great track program instills lessons that last a lifetime and supporting the team sends an important message. He offers up his own experience as a prime example. “I can say without a doubt that every single one of those young men,” he said, “in those four years what we learned on the track and the bonds that we made and what we learned about ourselves and the toughness and the discipline, that completely changed the course of all our lives. Because we still communicate and we still keep in touch and so forth, and I look at guys like Justin Loftus and Ian Solof, and you can see that that had so much to do with who we became. “This is part of the education, folks. This is an academic facility. Our children learn on this track who they are. Let’s give them the best facility that we possibly can because this is where they’re learning, this is where they’re growing up to be responsible young men and women. My view is that we should look at these athletic facilities the same that we look at a science lab or a math building or a library, because they all work together to build up our young men and women. Well, right now we have a dilapidated facility — it’s embarrassing. And it’s named after my dad, and for me and I know for a lot of other people that’s just completely unacceptable. Let’s build something that not only honors my dad but that also honors the future and the legacy of this amazing program.” Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Zavala99.