Maton, Summit team split for postseason

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Matthew Maton and his Summit (Bend. Ore.) teammates are prepared to go their separate ways into the postseason.

Maton, US#1 after breaking Galen Rupp's Oregon state meet record at Lane Community College on Nov. 1, has built his training schedule around the goal of trying to win the Foot Locker Cross Country Championship. He was third last year.

Meanwhile, Summit's boys team will travel to Eagle Island State Park in Idaho this Saturday without their star and try to earn a spot at Nike Cross Nationals. And even without Maton out front, the Storm figure to be one of the top contenders for the Northwest regional title.

At the Oregon Class 5A meet, Summit posted a perfect score of 15 (split apart only by a couple of individual qualifiers).

Maton mapped out a plan in June with his coaches, Carol and Jim McLatchie, to try to win Foot Locker and then go compete at the Bupa Edinburgh Cross Country Race and then the U.S. junior national cross country championships in Colorado, a qualifer for the World championships in China.

"NXN didn't come into the plans," Jim McLatchie said. "We held him back (from racing) as you may have noticed because he's going to be racing all the way to February."

The rest of the Summit team has known for the past year that their NXN dream would have to be achieved without Maton and have long accepted that fact, the coaches said.

It isn't that Maton doesn't want to run with his teammates.

"I would kill to be able to do both (NXN and Foot Locker)," Maton said.

But the fact that Foot Locker West falls on the same day as NXN means that runners from California and the Northwest have to choose one event or the other. In other parts of the country, runners can pursue both. (In the Northeast, runners have to choose one because the NXN and Foot Locker regional meets are the same day).

It wasn't always like this. Foot Locker used to permit some of NXN's top finishers to bypass the regional meet and go straight to San Diego. In 2005, for instance, Oregon's Kenny Klotz won the NXN title and then went to Foot Locker the following week and placed fourth.

Times have changed. The schedules aren't budging. And the qualification rules aren't bending.

The Summit team that will compete for an NXN berth this weekend put five guys in the top nine at the Oregon Class 5A race -- Alex Martin, Eric Fykerud, Tyler Jones, Chris Merlos and Thomas Schoderbek.

"They've had a whole year to think about it," Carol McLatchie said. "We looked that far ahead ... it's not a distraction."

At Foot Locker, Maton will get a chance to test himself against his main competition across the country -- defending champion Grant Fisher, 2013 runner-up John Dressel, Alex Ostberg and Andrew Hunter are all among those targeting the San Diego race.