BY NATE KOTISSO | STAFF WRITER
MISSION — Brianna Robles led on and off the track at La Joya Palmview, one of the most feared teams in the Valley the past few years. She qualified for the UIL state track and field meet twice before she graduated last year to run at Adams State University.
As Robles departed, a rising senior, Bailey Villalon, was looked at as the runner and personality to make up for the program’s loss.
“We lost a lot of good kids like Brianna, who was a point-producer for us,” La Joya Palmview coach Claudia Bazan said. “We have a young group this year, and Bailey is our veteran.”
This spring is the moment Villalon has been looking forward to for four years. Her senior year with cross country and track were supposed to be the coronation of another outstanding Lobo career, but an injury before September’s Meet of Champions in Donna derailed some of her personal goals for the fall.
“It started out of nowhere. I was running here at practice and I felt a pain, but I didn’t think anything of it,” Villalon said. “The pain progressed and that’s when I told my coach that there was something wrong. We couldn’t figure out what it was at first, so I laid off the hard workouts and did pool workouts instead.”
Villalon went to see a specialist who diagnosed her with runner’s knee, which dramatically changed the end of her final cross country season.
“I felt like it knocked me down,” Villalon said. “I had a lot of goals I wanted to hit, but I pulled through. It took a lot of patience and hard work to get to where I needed to be. This was my senior season after all.”
“Bailey was out for a good three weeks, so we were trying to stay positive and be patient,” Bazan said. “It becomes frustrating for us as well because what we planned for her in the pool didn’t seem to translate onto the field. We had to tell her that the focus wasn’t on the Meet of Champions or the districts. We knew that she was good enough to make it far, but we were waiting for the main event: regionals.”
Villalon, who was a UT Arlington commit at the time of the injury, still needed a strong finish to the cross country season if she wanted to sign with the Mavericks.
She pulled it off by winning the District 31-5A meet, posting a personal record (17 minutes, 16.8 seconds) for a second-place finish at the regional meet and was the only top-50 Class 5A girls finisher from the Valley at the state meet (19:27.7) in November.
“When I got the injury, I thought, ‘Oh gosh, what is the (UT Arlington) coach going to think?’” Villalon said. “But he was very supportive. Coach (John) Sauerhage told me that my health always comes first. ‘Take care of the injury and I know you’ll be back.’”
“She’s a go-getter,” Bazan said. “She’s going to work her heart out. She’s been on the varsity team for four years now. You can’t ask for a more committed kid than her.”
Eleven days after her 48th-place finish at the state meet, Villalon officially inked her letter of intent with UT Arlington.
“I already knew we had a couple graduates running up there (distance runners Eliseo Rodriguez and Victor Bocanegra) and Valeria Diaz from Sharyland (High), so that was really comforting,” Villalon said. “They all treated me like I was their own. I liked the team, the location and how together they were.”
As the track season enters its third week, Villalon is all systems go. She began the season with wins in the 800- and 1600-meter races in addition to spearheading the mile relay race team to victory at the Rey Ramirez Relays on Feb. 15.
Villalon and the Lobos will be back in action today at the Patriot Relays meet on the Mission Veterans campus.
“This is a time where some of our freshmen girls can work on their jitters,” Bazan said. “They’re not used to competing on this level, so our focus is to get these freshmen to believe in our system and work out those nerves before the competitions get bigger and bigger.”
“This will be a good test to see where we are,” Villalon said. “It’s always a good thing to go up against the best like Sharyland (High) and McAllen (High) and see how we compete individually and as a team.”