School has just ended, and the Cross Country team waits patiently for their coaches to arrive. They get dressed quickly, and prepare for warmups as a folding wagon full of cold water, spare running shoes, and track equipment is rolled onto Dolores Park by Coach Tony Marshall and Coach Emmalena Quesada. They even bring nutritious snacks like protein bars, sunflower seeds, and fruit. For today’s practice, about eight runners will run a total of a mile on Dolores Park’s grassy and uneven terrain with Coach Quesada, while Coach Tony guides injured athletes through their physical therapy.
This moment represents a typical weekday practice for Mission’s Cross Country team, which I have recently joined. Currently, I’ve been training with Coach Tony and Quesada, who have been leading me through various mobility, weight lifting, and stretching exercises.
Our team is led by these two married coaches that come to Mission after school to train some of our school’s most dedicated athletes. In the fall, Coach Tony and Coach Quesada train the school’s Cross Country team. In the winter they organize weight training for Track and Field athletes, which they also coach in the spring. Since the end of the pandemic, these two coaches have been a huge pillar to our school’s athletics.
It all began when their daughter–and several other runners at Mission High–were no longer able to continue their passion for running due to the pandemic and staff shortages. As a result, Coach Tony and Coach Quesada stepped in to lead the school’s Cross Country and Track and Field program. All while balancing their career as lawyers and club Track and Field coaches, Coach Tony and Coach Quesada became more and more cemented in our school’s athletics.
A reason why the two coaches are so integrated into our school athletics is because they do not exclusively train runners; student-athletes from various sports benefit from Coach Tony and Coach Quesada’s coaching. For example, this fall season the two coaches train student-athletes from almost every sport at the school, including players on the football, basketball, and volleyball teams. Whether it is simply conditioning for the off-season, sport-specific exercise programs, or physical therapy for injury recovery, Coach Tony and Coach Quesada welcome any athlete that is interested in enhancing their athletic performance through running.
The two coaches understand what student athletes need to be successful in sports, because they were once student athletes too. In high school, Coach Tony ran for track and field and played football. In college, Coach Tony competed in triathlons, but his ability to participate in intense sports diminished after receiving multiple leg injuries. As for Coach Quesada, she competed in both the high school and collegiate level of club volleyball.
Coach Tony and Coach Quesada are well respected by top athletes across the school, but coaching teen athletes is not always easy; as described by Coach Quesada, one of the most challenging parts of coaching is training athletes to do tasks that require discipline–like running five kilometers. While cross country is an extremely physically demanding sport, Coach Tony and Coach Quesada’s coaching strives to give athletes a new perspective on difficult tasks. As Coach Tony and Coach Quesada put it, persisting through mental and physical barriers is the essence of running. It doesn’t matter if you are a serious runner aiming to compete in the Junior Olympics, or just someone looking to get in shape; for runners, the coaches encourage athletes to measure success one step at a time, and relative to themselves.
“It’s like you’re climbing a ladder,” Coach Tony says, as he describes the racing process: “You just have to beat the person in front of you.” And, the best part is, no one goes through it alone; on Cross Country, athletes are surrounded by a driven and supportive team.
