For Saugus athletes coming to terms with tragedy, training was a form of therapy – LA Daily News
Concerns over trauma suffered by the Saugus High School boys and girls cross country teams after a student opened fire on campus on Nov. 14 overtook Head Coach Rene Paragas’s typical competition-related anxieties.
In the wake of the violence that left two young victims dead and three others wounded, the upcoming CIF-Southern Finals meet on Saturday, Nov. 23, appeared trivial and potentially too stressful for grieving students to endure.
Paragas convened his team and their parents at his home just hours after the shooting. He left it to them to decide if they would continue preparing for the regional competition. The student-athletes were first to insist on racing in honor of their slain classmates, Rey Duarte, father of sophomore runner Bella Duarte said.
“He gave them a number of avenues, stating ‘I am with you if you want to move forward, and with you if you don’t,’” Duarte said. “They all said, ‘coach, we need to move forward.’”
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Paragas and his assistant coaches still understood that members of the team were deeply shaken by the incident. Some did not eat or sleep for days after shots rang out on campus.
In the past, Kevin Berns’ daughter had confided that her greatest fear was the possibility of a shooting at their school. They, along with other Saugus faculty and students, had trained for such an event, but the assistant cross country coach and special education teacher never expected it to actually happen.
“For her to have to go through this, it takes away her innocence,” Berns said.
He was near the school’s running track on Nov. 14, while his daughter hid on the other side of campus in her first period classroom. After numerous unanswered phone calls, he breathed a momentary sigh of relief when she replied via text and wrote that she had not been injured.
Berns then rejoined other teachers, administrators and janitorial staff who did not hesitate in guiding hundreds of children to shelter as they fled from gunfire in the quad. Some, like Social Studies Department Chair Jim Klipfel, ran toward the sound of danger. Others, like choir teacher Kaitlin Holt, helped treat teenagers suffering from bullet wounds.
“Everybody rose up,” Berns said.
In the aftermath, lesson plans at Saugus High were immediately cancelled after the shooting. Berns, Duarte and other parents have been in constant communication with their children since the incident. They have practiced their typical morning routines with their daughters, walked with them to visit their school and done everything they could think of so they can return to some semblance of normalcy when classes resume Monday, Dec. 2.
The process of coping in the coming weeks, months and years will be different for every Saugus student, Chris Alzner-Salcedo, mother of junior runner Danielle Salcedo, said. For her daughter and the girls who chose to run in the Division 1 CIF race in Riverside, the cross country program has been “a form of therapy for them,” she said.
Practice sessions were optional ahead of the meet and scheduled at off-campus locations, Duarte said. That was done to help keep students’ minds off of the shooting and shield them from any possible media attention.
About 90 percent of the team showed up for at least one session to train, Paragas said. However, some of Saugus’s fastest runners opted out of the CIF meet due to a combination of physical and psychological injuries.
“You can’t convince yourself that you’re healthy,” Paragas said. “We can’t have runners who don’t want to run.”
Each team member’s unique healing process and their ongoing well-being had to take priority over their athletic performance, he said.
Paragas discussed strategy and self-care with his athletes a day before the competition, Friday, Nov. 22., before sending them off to run laps around Bridgeport Park. As the teens trained in the distance, he worried about any long-term trauma they might suffer. He was also concerned about any stigma they might face for being a part of the same team as the boy who opened fire at Saugus High.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigators identified the gunman as 16-year-old Nathaniel Berhow, who fatally shot himself. He ran for the school’s junior varsity cross country team as recently as October, placing 188th overall in the Mt. Sac Invitational with a time of 21:40, according to athletic.net. Paragas declined to go into detail about the shooter.
Santa Clarita residents have by and large been supportive of his team’s efforts to prolong their season, Paragas said. A handful of fans traveled over an hour to be at the Riverside competition. They wore blue shirts bearing the slogan “Saugus Strong,” while cheering at the tops of their lungs.
“It really helped, seeing people that I don’t know wearing our Saugus shirts coming out here to support us,” varsity runner Danielle Salcedo said.
So far, Paragas has not heard reports of any sort of backlash directed at the teens. However, assistant coach Jose Flores recalled being with his family at Central Park a day after a vigil was held there in memory of the victims. He was wearing Saugus Cross Country apparel and approached by a person who demanded to know if anything more could have been done to prevent the tragedy.
Berhow was a boy scout and also used to train karate at a local dojo, in addition to running cross country for his school. Neighbors acquainted with his family described him as quiet, well mannered and not the type to set off any red flags. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigators and federal agents have scoured his online interactions for anything that might explain his actions, but had not publicly suggested a motive as of Nov. 27.
“What we do know is he’s got a sister and his mom, and they are probably just as broken as the other two families whose kids have passed,” Duarte said. “There’s going to be people who are going to be very narrow minded about this situation and they will probably say things that will hurt his mom, but that’s not our style. I can’t imagine any families in our cross country program speaking evil of Nathan or his mom.”
Instead, the athletes, coaches and parents of the Saugus cross country program focused on the path ahead. But Paragas and the runners were unsure of how they would perform after a starting gun signaled the beginning of their 9:45 a.m. event at the Riverside Cross Country Course.
The Saugus girls battled 175 other competitors and endured the 3-mile event. They came together to finish second out of 31 other teams, allowing them to advance to the CIF State meet at Woodward Park in Fresno on Saturday, Nov. 30.
“We’ve won a lot of championships at this school, but this has to be one of the proudest moments of my coaching career,” Paragas said.
The boy’s varsity team raced with heart, but did not place high enough to proceed to the next stage of competition. Paragas acknowledged their prior achievements in their Division 1 debut this year, and praised them for stepping up to represent their classmates in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
“I think we’ve accomplished amazing things this season,” Paragas said. “They weren’t the goals we set out at the beginning of the year, but maybe these goals are even bigger.”