To understand how far Cal State Fullerton junior Samantha Huerta has come, you have to look past her recent trip to Austin, Texas, and the NCAA Track & Field Championships and her 14th-place finish in the 800 meters there. You have to look past her 1,500/800 double at the Big West Championships in April, past her 800 conference title her sophomore year, past the fourth-place finish in the Big West cross country meet that year – the best finish by a Titan in a generation – and past the school records she holds.
Yes, look past those, because those accolades are mere footnotes here.
Look at the shoes.
Look back to the beginning of the decade, when a middle-schooler from an impoverished background in La Mirada has state athletic testing. She runs a mile in slip-on Vans — and breaks six minutes.
“I was very unaware of my talent for running. To drop a sub six-minute mile without any running or training showed I had some kind of natural talent for this,” Huerta said.
You could say that. As the classic saying goes, to understand how far Huerta has come, you have to understand where she’s been. You also have to understand why it’s important that Huerta’s running career, which garnered those accolades, as well as a college education that wouldn’t have been available to her otherwise, stems from those shoes and what that day in middle school taught her.
“Our freshman year of high school, everyone’s thinking about college. I felt like my generation was always thinking about their next move,” she said. “I was living with my uncle, and we didn’t have any money. We’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, and my uncle has severe anxiety and depression and he’s living on disability.
“So when I got to high school, I thought about athletics and maybe I’ll go out for cross country.”
Huerta was still living with her uncle and still didn’t have running shoes. In fact, Huerta waited until her sophomore year at La Mirada High to go out for cross country. And it should be noted she won her first race: a tri-meet with La Habra and La Serna.
“I wanted more. I wanted more,” she said.
“I wanted to do better, and I realized then that this was going to be my way into college. I didn’t have money for great running shoes and that caused me to get injuries, but it also made for a good comeback story. I had shin splints, a pulled groin and a bone spur in my ankle. I was very, very injury-prone, but I knew I couldn’t give up.”
Despite going through three coaches in three years at La Mirada, Huerta got more.
For starters, she got her first pair of “running” shoes for Christmas of her sophomore year. That said, while they were an improvement from her slip-ons, they weren’t true running shoes.
She also got the first real taste of success, despite La Mirada not attending many of the top-shelf high school events. She won the cross country Woodbridge Invitational as a senior, lowered her mile time from 5:11 as a sophomore to 4:49 as a senior, where she finished ninth in the state.
This put Huerta on the radar of John Elders, Cal State Fullerton’s cross country and track & field head coach, and his chief distance assistant, Alex Kibbe. Huerta was exactly the type of athlete the two loved to recruit: someone with undisputed talent who was under scouted because of a high school program’s lack of training sophistication. That they recruited her after she ran “not my best race at Mt. SAC” meant the world to Huerta.
It was a perfect fit for both. Elders immediately realized what he had in Huerta and knew because of her injury history, he had to train her differently than some of his other runners. He couldn’t expect Huerta to run 80-90-mile weeks and have her stay healthy, and it’s a testament to Elders’ next-level approach that he tailored training to maximize Huerta’s strengths.
“No matter what’s going on with her, how she’s felling physically or whatever personal stuff is going on, whenever she steps on the track, she’s an absolute beast. She’s just money,” Elders said.
“It’s hard to explain, but it’s fun to watch her run because she’s just such a competitor. She’s one of those unique individuals who can block everything out and just focus on what she needs to do at that moment.”
At the same time, Huerta realized her dream of going to college and realized it at difficult juncture in her life.
“When he offered me the scholarship, during a time in my life when my uncle was sick and I was living with friends, I can remember getting off the phone with him and breaking down in tears,” she said.
Huerta’s struggles weren’t quite complete. She overcame a car accident the end of her freshman year that cost her “her shot to surprise everyone at the conference meet,” and left her with recurring neck issues. But her time had just begun.
The following year, Huerta finished fourth at the Big West Cross Country Championships, the best finish by a Titan since 1994. She was either first or second among Titan runners in six of seven races as Cal State Fullerton finished third in conference — its best finish since 1992. During track season, Huerta made a fleet-footed assault on the school record book, setting three records: (2:07.36 in the 800, 4:25.16 in the 1,500 and 4:48.02 in the mile) and becoming the first Titan to win the Big West title in the 800.
This season, Huerta isn’t surprising anyone, least of all herself.
She was named the Big West Women’s Track Athlete of the Year after defending her conference 800 title and becoming the first Titan to win the 1,500 in the 36-year history of the Big West Championships. She finished ninth in the NCAA West Regional to punch her ticket to the NCAA Championships, where she finished 14th to earn second-team All-American honors.
And she big-footed her own school records in both events: going 2:03.96 in the 800 at the NCAA West Regionals and 4:18.39 in the 1,500 at the Bryan Clay Invitational at Azusa Pacific in April.
Yes, now is the time to look at those accolades and realize Huerta is more than one of those special athletes that increasingly come to Cal State Fullerton. She’s one of those special people who sees everything through the prism of someone who knows what it’s like to walk in shoes she had no business running in.
“What I like about Fullerton is it’s a school where everyone comes to work for their own educations. This is a school of workers who don’t have everything handed to them,” she said. “To represent those kind of students makes me proud.”
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