![](/sites/default/files/imported/Photos/150908_Sturgisxc_2H.jpg)
Sturgis XC 'Star' Takes Center Stage
September 8, 2015
By Wes Morgan
Special for Second Half
Daniel Steele became a star in the fifth grade when he played a star in his class’ Christmas production.
Ever since, he’s fed off that adrenaline rush each time the curtain has gone up.
He’s played Rooster in “Annie Jr.” and the White Rabbit in “Alice In Wonderland.” Steele greedily gobbled goodies as Augustus in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” He was cowman Slim in “Oklahoma” and eventually landed lead roles of Mr. McAfee in “Bye Bye Birdie” and Mr. Browning in “Leaving Iowa” before his most demanding performance as Seymour Krelborn in “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Steele said at an early age he was comfortable at the center of attention, which is where he first experienced the joy of putting in work for the payoff of a laugh – and where he learned the importance of precise delivery and timing.
“I feel like I’ve always been a lively person,” the Sturgis High School senior said. “Singing and music have always been a part of my life. It’s something I really love doing.”
One day Steele, who also knows his way around the guitar and clarinet when he’s not leading the Sturgis High School marching band as drum major, hopes to earn a living in entertainment. Most folks, however, know Steele for his rapid ascent in the world of Michigan high school distance running.
That is one of Steele’s talents that materialized his freshman year when he made a decision to be good rather than coast on natural ability.
Believe it or not, Steele said he’s far more nervous stepping up to the starting line at a big meet than delivering a monologue or singing a solo in front of a packed house.
Last season, Steele flirted with a sub-16-minute time for the first half of the season leading up to the Jackson Invitational. He was determined that would be the race where he’d finally break through. He ran a 15:59.5.
“That was one of the biggest things for me as a runner,” he said. “That had been such a big goal for such a long time. That was huge. Achieving something like that kind of opened my eyes like, ‘Hey, if I can do that, I can probably do more.’ It’s going to hurt, but I can do this.”
Steele, last year’s Wolverine Conference champion who is considering running cross country and track at Grand Valley State University, has set the highest of goals for his final season. He’s gone on record saying he will leave Sturgis as the school-record holder, and his aim is to go undefeated.
Keith Keyser, a big supporter of Sturgis athletics, holds the program’s fastest time of 15:36. Before Steele’s third-place finish at the Lower Peninsula Division 2 Finals last year, the best performance by a Sturgis runner at an MHSAA championship race was Keyser’s fifth-place performance in 1981.
“He will be working on his racing technique this year to attack those goals,” Sturgis coach Emerson Green said. “Time improvements are nice, but since cross country times are not linear due to weather, course, competition, etc., he will need to be able to adjust his race strategy based on what the competition yields.”
That’s something Steele learned the hard way this past March, when he disregarded his targeted first-lap split in the 800-meter MHSAA Final and dropped from first to eighth place on the second lap.
Pushing his body to the red line too early cost him. Though the experience taught him to implement more method rather than relying solely on guts, old habits are hard to break.
“I can’t feel too bad about it because I really did give it everything I had,” Steele said. “I learned my body is only capable of so much. I want to push myself to the limit, but running is tricky.
“It’s not always consistent and you can’t always go out and give it everything you have and have it work out. The last 200 meters of the race, it was kind of like muscle failure. Everything was falling apart and nothing was working. But I still remember pushing through all of that.”
Green, a chemistry teacher at Sturgis, hopes he can convince Steele that winning races isn’t always about who has the biggest heart.
Steele credits the guidance he’s received from Green, a former college runner at Alma and a 21-year head coach for the Trojans, for helping him grasp the importance of thinking his way through a race and through life.
“I have a lot of respect for Coach Green for how he carries himself as an adult and how he’s helped all of us on the team,” Steele said. “He’s an all-around great guy and really knows what he’s doing. Personally, he’s helped me a ton with his wisdom. Having the experience that he does … and that he’s very personable, it’s easy for me to listen to him and put to good use everything he has to say.”
Every leading man can benefit from a competent supporting actor, and Steele is now being truly pushed in race situations by classmate Shawn Bell, who was 14th at Michigan International Speedway last fall with a time of 16:11.4.
The two finished 1-2 at the St. Joseph Invitational late last month in their only race of the year so far. Steele clocked a 16:25, and Bell crossed the line in 16:29.
“Last year I was kind of training by myself,” Steele said. “I was out in front of the pack in workouts, and in most races I was the frontrunner. Even at the state meet I was pretty much by myself because it was so spread out.
“This year I feel like Shawn has really played a part in the sense that he’s a lot faster now than he was his junior year. He’s made a lot of good steps mentally. He’s a very talented kid; we’ve seen that since middle school. Now he’s really putting in the work and now he’s right up there with me. We’ve been pushing each other like crazy.”
When the cross country season is over, Steele will begin winter workouts for track. Sometimes he uses those hours running around Sturgis to recite lines for the winter musical.
If anyone sees him darting down a sidewalk apparently in mid-conversation, he wants people to know he’s not talking to himself; he’s simply working through a scene.
See below for a video piece on Steele by JoeInsider.com.
Wes Morgan has reported for the Kalamazoo Gazette, ESPN and ESPNChicago.com, 247Sports and Blue & Gold Illustrated over the last 12 years and is the publisher of JoeInsider.com. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Sturgis' Daniel Steele surges past the crowd during his MHSAA Regional race last season. (Middle) Steele rounds the curve at Michigan International Speedway on the way to finishing third in the LP Division 2 Final. (Photos courtesy of the Steele family.)
![](/sites/default/files/imported/Photos/151021_Marquette_2H.jpg)
Marquette Primed to Continue Dynasty
October 21, 2015
By Dennis Grall
Special for Second Half
MARQUETTE – Red is the dominant color when you talk about cross country in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Courtesy of one of the pre-eminent cross country programs in the state, red is worn by the Marquette High School teams that have been a scourge to the rest of the U.P. since the sport's inception.
The boys have won 22 Upper Peninsula big-school championships heading into Saturday's U.P. Finals at Beauchamp's Grove in Flat Rock, in the countryside west of Escanaba. The boys have been competing since 1966, and Marquette began its title string in 1979.
The girls have been even more dominant, claiming 29 U.P. titles since the sport began in 1980, including a string of 13 straight (1980-92).
Both teams have won the past two U.P. Division 1 titles and are expected to repeat again Saturday.
All of the championships have come with Dale Phillips as head coach. Phillips, 73, started coaching both teams in 1977. He was inducted into the Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Fame in 2009 for his coaching exploits with Marquette's cross country and track and field programs.
Asked what has kept him running the program for 39 years, Phillips did not hesitate. "My love working with the program and the young men and young women and seeing the success they can achieve," he said, noting he is coaching a second generation of runners and enjoys visiting the parents of today's athletes, many of whom he coached.
"They are a great recruiting tool," he said of parents bringing their kids into the program.
Phillips traces the program's success to when it started piling up those various trophies. "Then we started drawing boys and girls into it. They like what we do," he said. "The program kept building. It is like the Menominee football program. It seems they re-load every year, just like we do.
"You are going to hit a down period. There were some lean years," said Phillips. Of course, those "lean years" meant settling for second, third or fourth place.
"Sometimes you just don't get that quality you need. You just get kids into the program and they really work."
This year's leaders are Lance Rambo for the boys and Lindsey Rudden for the girls. Rambo is looking into running at either Central Michigan University, Michigan State or Grand Valley State after graduation. Rudden, who has never won a U.P. cross country title but owns eight U.P. track championships (with MHSAA meet records in the 800, 1,600 and 3,200 and with the 1,600 and 3,200 relay units), has verbally committed to run for MSU.
But it is not about super individuals. Rather, it is about the overall depth of the program and the family-like atmosphere. "The varsity cheers for the jayvee group, and the jayvees cheer for their varsity teammates. They know they are a total team. It is not just the top seven we are interested in," Phillips said.
"You don't have to be the number one or two runner," Phillips tells his squads. "You can be number five, six or seven. You can help us immensely by getting ahead of the scorers of our opponents."
To illustrate, at the recent Great Northern Conference meet at Marquette's Presque Isle (complete with a water spout on Lake Superior, tornado warning, lightning, thunder and rain), the first nine girls jayvee finishers wore Marquette red. Marquette's boys and girls swept the varsity and junior varsity team titles.
"We emphasize that we are a team. The kids get so close as a team," Phillips said of the runners gathering for a variety of activities such as meals, movies and swimming. "We are a family. That word has come up for years."
Of course, a lot of that likely comes from the success they have all enjoyed together throughout their careers and from watching their predecessors do the same thing.
Agreeing that success breeds success, Phillips said, "that is a tremendous positive we have going for us. We have a large freshman class out and they learn how we do our workouts correctly and how we handle pace (of racing). We have some talent coming up."
The Redmen set such a tremendously high bar of success without piling up excessive mileage. "We try to get them to reach their peak at the end of the season," said Phillips.
While every coach tries to accomplish that goal, there is a fine line to reach in the process – no matter the sport or the level the athlete is playing.
"Leadership on a team is important," said Phillips, noting he sends groups of runners out at various distances and locations and tries to match them up with those of similar skill sets. With captains such as Rambo and Rudden setting the pace this year, Phillips knows the workouts will be fruitful. "Those kids lead by example. They keep the young runners going. They have responded well over the years," he said.
The coaching staff sets mileage limits and tries to monitor how much the athletes do on their spare time. "We are not a high mileage team," said Phillips. "We try to get a recovery day after a tough workout or a tough meet. We structure our program to keep the legs fresh and minimize injuries."
The runners do just 30-40 miles a week, much of it on an exquisite city trail system or at a grassy park close to nearby Northern Michigan University. "If we do a hard workout, we try to find a soft surface," said Phillips. "We can do hard workouts but they are not hard on the legs."
Including pre-and-post stretching sessions, the weekday workouts last two hours a day in August before classes begin and no more than 90 minutes a day once the academic season starts. "We do longer intervals before the start of the season and shorter intervals later," he said, adding runners are told not to run on one of the weekend days.
Having quality runners throughout the group prevents varsity runners from becoming complacent. "Our jayvees keep the varsity on their toes," Phillips said.
He also encourages his runners to use alternative sports in their training to keep their legs fresh. "If you don't feel like running, jump on a bike. Biking is an excellent cross-trainer. They also go cross country skiing. You shouldn't run 365 days a year," he said.
"If you're in a winter sport, you can't get in better shape than running in cross country," said Phillips, noting several of Marquette's highly successful winter athletes have been on his teams. "That has been a drawing card as well" to attract participation.
In his 39 years at the helm, Phillips said a major highlight was when the girls won the prestigious Holly Invitational and the boys were 10th out of 30 teams in 1982. It was the first time the Redettes and Redmen participated, and many of the downstate runners were surprised to learn Marquette came from the Upper Peninsula.
The girls finished second, fifth, seventh, ninth and 11th and beat Clio, ranked No. 1 in the state at the time. "They couldn't believe someone from the U.P. could come down and dominate a big meet," said Phillips.
Competing in Holly, and big meets in Wisconsin, gives his runners a chance to see "other faces and other teams" and a chance to gauge their performances. That is especially important because cross country (in addition to track and field, tennis, golf, and swimming and diving) is split into Upper Peninsula and Lower Peninsula Finals.
While Phillips and former U.P. cross country coaches John Prokos, Dave Lahtinen and Arne Henderson previously made a strong push to merge for an all-peninsula MHSAA Finals, they were unable to convince the majority of U.P. teams to accept the proposal, which has been rejected twice.
In the meantime, Marquette makes everyone else look at red across the Upper Peninsula.
Denny Grall retired in 2012 after 39 years at the Escanaba Daily Press and four at the Green Bay Press-Gazette, plus 15 months for WLST radio in Escanaba; he served as the Daily Press sports editor from 1970-80 and again from 1984-2012. Grall was inducted into the Upper Peninsula Sports Hall of Fame in 2002 and serves as its executive secretary. E-mail him at [email protected] with story ideas for the Upper Peninsula.
PHOTOS: (Top) Marquette’s girls cross country runners, including Lindsey Rudden, front right, prepare for the start at Marquette’s cross country relays earlier this season. (Middle) A pair of Marquette runners including Lance Rambo, right, compete during the boys race. (Below) Coach Dale Phillips has led the program for 39 years. (Photos courtesy of Marquette athletic department.)