In seniors Christopher Toppe, Gabriel Chin and Jordyn Brown, Thousand Oaks High track and field has a trio of seniors who have developed into NCAA Division I talents in the decathlon and heptathlon as Lancers.
Call it the Marlene Wilcox effect.
Now in her sixth season at the helm in Thousand Oaks, the Olympic heptathlete is hard at work molding the next generation of multievent stars at her alma mater.
“It is nice to be able to pay it forward and to have, in a sense, your signature as a multieventer,” Wilcox said. “Multievents do get overlooked, and they really are quite extraordinary.”
Wilcox qualified for the Olympic Games in 1980, which were boycotted by the United States and 64 other nations, just after finishing a record-setting high school career at Thousand Oaks. She won a state long jump title as well as four section titles in the hurdles and long jump.
She won an NCAA Division II title in the heptathlon in 1983 and finished runner-up at the Division I meet. Wilcox still holds the high school pentathlon national record with 4,333 points.
When it comes to track and field’s most grueling events — the multis — the veteran coach who wears Olympic rings on a silver chain around her neck knows what it takes to be great.
“It’s a lot,” Wilcox said. “It definitely takes a certain personality.”
Teammates Gabriel Chin and Christopher Toppe have dominated the county leaderboards in recent years, from the hurdles to the jumps and even the throws.This season, with Chin recovering from a torn meniscus suffered in the basketball season, Toppe has climbed to county rankings of No. 1 in the long jump (24 feet, 0.5 inches), No. 2 in the 110-meter hurdles (14.85 seconds), No. 4 in the pole vault (13 feet, four inches) and No. 5 in the high jump (six feet, five inches).
“You just have got to not let up at all,” Toppe said. “You have got to love the challenge.”
Just days before undergoing knee surgery March 18, Chin threw the shot put 47 feet, 11.5 inches. That mark remains the farthest of any local thrower this season.
The pair credit Wilcox with helping them adjust to the decathlon. Competing in the event at the NCAA Division I level is now an attainable goal.
“It simply wouldn’t be possible without her,” said Toppe, who has received college interest from the likes of Arizona, UC Berkeley, and Duke. “It’s such a complex event, managing all 10 of them, that without having someone that has the experience or really knows what they are doing, you can’t do it without getting injured, or at all.”
Chin, bound for the University of Pennsylvania, agreed that Wilcox’s own background in the heptathlon gives her perspective that has helped the pair to reach their goals.
“I had always kind of wanted to do the multis, but having a coach who had done it is a completely different experience,” Chin said. “You need someone who knows how to do each event, but you also need someone who can oversee the overall workload.”
“It is really reassuring,” Brown added. “You have someone you can ask questions, really look up to, know their story.”
When Chin struggled with shin splints his junior year, Wilcox pulled back on the jump training that was putting so much stress on his lower legs and instead leaned into making improvements in the throws — now some of the senior’s strongest events.
When Brown, a Cal State Northridge commit and newcomer to the multis as of this summer, struggled with overrunning the board on the long jump runway, her coach shared a tip that worked for her as a state champion jumper.
“In the past, I struggled a lot with being OK with failing,” Brown said of adjusting to training for the heptathlon. “You have to learn to be comfortable with failing because with failing, you are learning something new. You are learning something you need to work on, so not every loss is totally a loss. Learning these new events, you are allowed to make early mistakes when you are new to an event.”
Perhaps the biggest key to multievent success, Wilcox said, is the mental side.
“Every athlete wants to be perfect, but in a multievent, you rarely get to be,” Wilcox said. “You have to be able to roll with that. That is a hard thing to do when you are an athlete.
“We are basically assaulting our body so that it can acclimate to do something extraordinary. In their case, they have got to do it 10 times in 10 different systems. (They are) not just a distance runner, not just a sprinter, not just a hurdler or a jumper or a thrower, (they are) all of them, all together, within two days.”
Special bonds have formed with the coach and the three athletes chasing their multievent dream on the Thousand Oaks track.
“It’s amazing. Having a community of people doing it changes it completely,” Chin said. “(Coach) is an incredibly energetic person. It infects the team — it helps everyone.”
Toppe, Brown and the rest of the Lancers will be in action at the CIF-Southern Section Division 2 Prelims May 9 at Ontario High School.
Dominic Massimino is a staff writer for the Star. He can be reached at dominic.massimino@vcstar.com. For more coverage, follow @vcsdominic on Twitter and Instagram.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Olympian Wilcox trains multievent track stars at Thousand Oaks High
Reporting by Dominic Massimino, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
