Maggie RedmondCross country

Patch

Last week: Redmond, a 16-year-old junior, saw an immediate benefit from her second summer at a distance-running camp by running a course-record 23 minutes flat, 84 seconds faster than the old mark on the 5,000-meter layout at Hohenfels on Saturday.

“The Hohenfels course is one of the toughest we run,” Redmond said as she jogged home from a Tuesday practice session. “It has five hills — a very slow course. It takes a long time to run.”

Hills, however, have turned into a specialty for Redmond, who finished eighth overall in last October’s European championships in Heidelberg.

“I went to a running camp this summer at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo.,” she said. “They work on your form and technique and running at altitude. I could really tell the difference when I got back here.”

The course record is the second held by Redmond. She set the mark for the layout at Aviano, Italy, last fall.

B.J. TaylorFootball

Naples

Last week: Taylor, a 17-year-old senior playing in his first high school football game, ran the ball 25 times for 301 yards and six touchdowns Saturday in the Wildcats’ 54-40 Division II victory at Vilseck, Germany.

“In 25 years of coaching, I’ve never had a player with such great lateral movement and the vision to see a guy coming at you from 12 yards away,” Naples coach Jim Hall said of his solidly muscled 5-foot-8, 145-pounder. “He’ll spin and turn and cut across the field and the next thing you know he’s running down the opposite sideline for a touchdown.”

Saturday, Taylor scored on runs of 12, 37, 27, five, nine and 48 yards. Not bad for someone whose football career and presence at Naples goes all the way back to earlier this summer.

“He told me he’d never played football — that he was a basketball player,” Hall said. “I said, ‘Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll turn you into a football player.’ ”

Hall said Taylor still sees basketball as his main endeavor. “He’ll practice football a couple of hours a day, then go over to the gym and lift weights,” Hall said. “That just shows you what kind of person he is.”

— Selected by Stars and Stripes staff

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