Track-ing a winner

Newly formed Titans club producing big results

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Charlie shoemaker⁄the gazette India Knight, 11, of Germantown, works out with her Titans Track Club teammates at Northwest High Thursday. The two-year-old club has experienced immediate success.

‘‘Montgomery County does not have junior high-school track,” Dave Knight, co-founder and head coach of the Titans Track Club said. ‘‘It is really untapped.”

In fact, the only outlet that many middle-schoolers who want to run track seriously have is to join club track teams outside of school. Many of those clubs are centered in the track hotbed of Prince George’s County, like the Hummingbirds, based in Hyattsville. But a few established programs exist in Montgomery County, like the Firebirds, based in Gaithersburg. When Knight and his wife Alexia moved to Germantown, the pair, who ran track at Iowa State in the late 1980s, decided to have their own daughters, India and Kennedy, run with the Firebirds.

‘‘I had been trained as a coach, but I thought that I might be too tough on my own kids,” Knight said. ‘‘But once we got there, it seemed like we were doing a lot of our own coaching at the practices. We just decided that we could take the girls to Northwest, which was closer to home, and start our own club.”

Initially, the plan was to create a small track club as a place where the Knights could train to compete in U.S.A. Track and Field and Amateur Athletic Union junior events. However, as other families drifted away from the Firebirds, and saw the Knights working out on the track, they joined in as well. Last year the Titans, which trains runners between the ages of 6 and 16, were born.

‘‘Some people say that we branched off from the Firebirds, but we started from scratch,” Knight said. ‘‘People in the community saw us, and it made sense for a lot of the other kids. We’ve really grown by word of mouth.”

One runner who came out because of that word of mouth was Mark Small, 14, of Germantown, who joined the Titans last year. Small worked out on his own while attending Rocky Hill Middle School, but when he got to the Titans, he found that club track was a much different experience.

‘‘The coaches really take time to help you out,” Small said. ‘‘There’s a lot of difference. You get a lot of help. There’s more people to watch you and teach you form.”

Small, who will be a sophomore at brand-new Clarksburg High next year, has taken that teaching and turned it into results on the track. He is one of the 24 members of the Titans that have qualified for the USATF and⁄or AAU Junior Olympics. The USATF Junior Olympics will be held from July 26-30 at Morgan State University in Baltimore, while the AAU Junior Olympics will be contested from July 31-Aug. 5 at Norfolk (Va.) State University. The proliferation of so many qualifiers was not totally unexpected, as a smaller Titans squad has six runners finish in the top six in the country in their age brackets last year, including India Knight, who won a national championship in the AAU’s 10-year-old bantam division.

‘‘There is such a high demand for track and field in this area,” Alexia Knight said. ‘‘There was a need for us to be here. If kids get exposure to the track early enough, it makes such a big difference on how much they’re able to develop long term. They start to do technique and learn the fundamentals, and then if they have the natural ability as well, it can grow even more.”

One of the runners that has benefited most from the individual attention is Ekpone, who as a student at Robert Frost Middle School, dabbled in track. However, it was not until she was spotted working out by the Titans coaches that she began to take track seriously.

‘‘I wanted to join a track team so badly,” Ekpone said. ‘‘No team [except the Titans] would come up to me. That’s why I joined them. They’ve helped improve my skills and my running ability. I’ve gotten better.”

She’s gotten so much better that Dave Knight thinks she has a legitimate shot to win an AAU national title later this summer. Ekpone, who has qualified in the 100-meter, 200-meter, 400-meter and 4x400-meter races, has already run a 100-meter race in 12.1 seconds. According to Knight, the youth girls division (13-14 year old) winner last year ran a winning time of 12.7 seconds.

‘‘We do try to spot talent,” Knight said. ‘‘That’s how we saw Olivia. She could win a national title, but I think all of our kids have that ability.”

With other competitive track clubs in and around Montgomery County, however, the Titans have not grown just because of an ability to provide technical expertise. Families whose children join the Titans are expected to participate in all of the activities, whether it be staying through practice, or helping with fundraisers to cover the gap in the $150 fee that each member pays, and the extra costs associated with meets and events all year. That mandate has created a community more close knit than many of the other clubs on the AAU and USATF circuit.

‘‘I went to the other local teams,” Katie Wolf, 14, of Potomac said. ‘‘I hung around, but the Titans were the most welcoming. They were a great match.”

Wolf is one of many of the Titans top runners who were drawn to the track because of family connections. Hassan Dixon, of Germantown, who will compete in the Junior Olympics in the 400 meters and the long jump, joined the Titans because his mother helped the Knights form the club. Wolf, whose own mother Polly is now heavily involved with the Knights, went from not knowing how to run with spikes, to qualifying for the Junior Olympics in the 100 meters and the 4x400 races. She will attend Churchill next year, ready for the rigors of high-school track.

‘‘The Titans have gotten me accustomed to meets and stuff,” she said. ‘‘I’ve learned a lot to improve my time. I know how to pace myself. I’ll be ready for high school.”