Participation trophies are a good way to elicit eye rolls: Let’s not salute someone for merely showing up.
But no one has yet created an award that could properly honor what three cross-country runners from tiny Valentine School accomplished by completing the class 1A state meet held earlier this month at Old Settlers Park in Round Rock.
Junior Eduardo Cardenas-Ramirez finished 36th; his older brother, senior Erick Ramirez, placed 85th; and sophomore Robert Alvarado came in 102nd in a field of 146 top qualifiers from around the state. Why would that be worth recognizing? Because the three runners make up 60 percent of their school’s entire male enrollment, and the town of Valentine, located about 35 miles northwest of Marfa and 25 miles east of the Mexico border, is home to an estimated 73 total residents.
Early on the Thursday morning before the meet, Valentine’s cross-country contingent—McWilliams, assistant coach and social studies teacher Bianca Porras, and the four runners—boarded the school’s Suburban for the nearly five-hundred-mile ride to Round Rock. The trip would have normally taken about seven and a half hours, but Porras built in some educational stops along the way. They headed to San Antonio before going up Interstate 35, with visits to the Alamo, the River Walk, and, by spontaneous popular demand, the Buc-ee’s in New Braunfels.