First-year coach David McMillan poses with 6/7 of the Durango boys at the state cross country meet. Contributed photo.
Back before most of the people visiting this site were born, Durango was the scourge of Colorado High School cross country. Boys or girls, it didn't matter much. When Durango stepped to the line at the state meet, they were viewed with the kind of awe and respect that teams like Fort Collins and Mountain Vista receive these days. Team champions, individual champions, Durango had a little bit of all of that.
In case you've missed it, there's been a resurgence in Durango distance shaking things up in the southwestern corner of the state. There's a good chance those tremors will be felt on the Front Range before long.
Whenever and wherever this happens, it's always about talent, but there may be something about the coaching part of the equation as well.
This fall, David McMillan took over the coaching reins at Durango High School. He's traveled an interesting road to get to Durango.
McMillan grew up in South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa, to be a little more precise. He grew up busy with sports and dabbled in cricket, tennis, squash, soccer, and rugby. He even ran a little track and cross country, only not very much of that running kind of stuff. It simply wasn't his primary interest. Growing up, McMillan felt tennis was his sport, and noteworthy accomplishments by close family members gave him sufficient reason to be pulled in that direction.
When McMillan's call to mandatory military duty came, he took part in a camp time trial and changed the course of his life by setting a camp record in that time trial with the officer in charge of cross country and track and field in attendance. For the next two years, McMillan ran for the South African military and quickly became the national champion at 1500 and 3000 meters. Later, as a geology student at the University of Cape Town, he would run a personal best of 3:52.14 in the mile.
With turmoil on the rise in his home country, McMillan took advantage of the opportunity to come to the United States to study geology and run for Penn State University. Later, as a Saucony-sponsored runner, he would travel the country and dabble at several different distances beyond the mile. Well, maybe "dabble" is too soft of a word for it. McMillan owns personal bests of 7:52 at 3000 meters, 13:40 at 5000 meters, and 28:45 at 10,000 meters.
For many of the years between the years at Penn State and now, McMillan lived in next-door Utah, working as the long distance chair for USATF-Utah and developing there a road racing circuit which persists to this day. He was still racing when he moved to Utah, but eventually let that go as life and business opportunities intervened. Meanwhile, the McMillan children gravitated toward as many different sports as their father. Daughter Samantha, however, made a shambles of the Utah girls distance competition while in high school, winning a combined total of nine state titles in track and cross country.
In 2011, McMillan and his family moved to Durango, where his wife joined a pediatric practice. Owning his own environmental consulting firm left McMillan with some discretion about how his workday is parceled out. So, when Mark Dutro left Durango High School to take the cross country opening at Fort Lewis College, it was a natural decision for McMillan to throw his hat into the ring for the coaching position at Durango High School.
One season in, he's already made a considerable success of that story. And all of this with someone at the helm who confesses that he "struggled with cross country" when he was in his competitive prime.
Despite running with only one scoring varsity senior this fall and losing the #2 and #3 runners from last year's team to mountain biking and nordic interests, Durango's boys finished ninth at the 4A state meet. That represented a considerable improvement over last year's state finish. The girls, who started the season with at least one very big hole to fill from graduation and lost three more runners to injuries and off-season basketball, managed a 12th-place finish at state.
You can't help but get the very strong sense that the excitement is back in Durango distance. If you haven't gotten that sense yet, you're about to. And, that's a matter of no small concern if your school competes in 4A.
Durango is the kind of community that will throw its arms around a distance program. It is every bit as outdoorsy as Aspen or Crested Butte and has more cross country tradition than either. The biggest local worry may be competing with the mountain biking and nordic interests for the available pool of talent. But, the pool is large by 4A standards. And, 11 of 14 state cross country runners for the Demons should be coming back next fall.
This is a team that travels often and appears to travel well (there aren't many options on that front if you're going to be successful racing out of Durango). They've already been to the Front Range once and Albuquerque once in the indoor season. There is more travel on the docket. We may not see them again on the Front Range during the indoor season, but they will be making the trip over the Continental Divide a couple times (or more) during the CHSAA-sanctioned season.
Although Joe and Shannon Maloney are the current marquee names, it's not a two-person show. Depth is building in behind the big guns, depth that includes Alastair, the McMillans' youngest son. That surplus of depth also includes Nicholas Turco, perhaps the most promising freshman to don a Durango uniform since Reagan Robb.
It's always exciting to see a team on the rise. More competition means more fun for all, and it looks like we can get accustomed to a bigger piece of that competition coming from Durango.