There are high school kids with talent oozing from elbows to ears, making the sports they play seem as simple as sliding into Velcro shoes. They run faster, jump higher and stiff-arm competitors as easily as taking that next, comfortable breath.
There are athletes, aplenty. Then there’s Saniyah Starks.
Keeping up with the Crawford High School senior on the track can cause legs and lungs to ache. Starks, who is headed to UC Riverside, is believed to the first female athlete from the diverse school to receive a Division I scholarship since UCLA runner Judy Reed in 1978.
Want to know what’s really exhausting? The rest of her life.
“You know the cliché, you wish you have 100 of her on your team?” said Matt Marquez, Crawford’s track coach. “Well, it’s true. When your best athlete is also your hardest worker and nicest person, that’s incredibly impressive.”
In sports, we too often fawn at the altar of smugness, ego and celebrity. We too rarely celebrate hard work, humility and well-rounded greatness achieved in the relative shadows.
This is Starks, the student: cumulative 4.11 GPA, AP and honors classes ranging from psychology to pre-calculus and literature, college-level courses in math and English from San Diego City College, treasurer of the school’s top student group, a peer mentor.
You think you get the idea. You don’t.
Midway through Starks’ freshman year, she became Crawford’s only girl — all 110 pounds of her back then — to run in groups made up entirely of boys, because her performances ranked among them. Many days, Starks was the only girl in the weight room with the guys, dead-lifting nearly 300 pounds as the football team gawked.
“I wanted to push myself more,” Starks said of running with the boys. “I was a little nervous about it. They’re really fast. They don’t want get beat by a girl, which was kind of funny, so they tried their best. It helped everyone.”
She’s fearless … and soft-spoken. Tenacious … and kind.
“She’s not unwilling to break barriers in a very respectful, modest and humble way, but she’ll do it,” Crawford teacher Cindy Page said. “She’s very courageous in that way. She’s very unfazed by a lot of things. If she is fazed, she’s very good at hiding it.”
Page leads AVID, the program for aspiring, first-generation college students. Starks finished the course in the fall, but rather than opting for a free period in the spring or skating through something less burdensome, she volunteered to tutor juniors in the program.
This from a track star making school history.
“It’s crazy to think about it that way,” said Starks, with a slightly sheepish giggle. “It feels like you’re showing people it doesn’t really matter what school you’re going to. If you do the work in the classroom and on the field, you can go places.”
That’s a powerful lesson at Crawford, where hallways become melting pots for kids from Somalia to Vietnam who have been scattered by life’s unpredictable winds. More than 50 languages are spoken on campus, creating a uniquely rich fabric.
The challenges? Those are unique, too.
In the middle of it all, Starks leads and leads and finds a way to lead some more. Marquez said her fifth-place time of 58.76 seconds in the 400 meters at the Division II CIF finals caught the attention of Riverside and others as he lobbied for interest. Since COVID-19 swallowed up the track season in 2020, Stark finds herself essentially two years removed from competitive running.
The lone exception came during a San Diego High invitational the week before the pandemic hit the pause button. Starks won the 200 and 400 meters in the open division.
Marquez believes she could sprint past 57s in the 400 and reach the high-56s.
“We were afraid we were going to lose her,” said Page, who taught Starks in AP psychology. “A lot of times at Crawford, when we have talented athletes they’ll go to a more prestigious program. It says something about her, too, that she’s stayed with Crawford.
“She could have gone anywhere.”
Loyalty lives in those talented legs.
Starks fills in on relay teams beyond her 4x100 group to buoy the team, even if it might distract or drain from her events. There’s no jealousy of the standout, those who know her said. In fact, quite the opposite. The school celebrates its remarkable own.
“Honestly, I think if I said to Saniyah, ‘We need you to play wide receiver (in football) on Friday night,’ she’d suit up,” Marquez said. “She’s all for the team. So, good things happen to good people, right?”
The next milestone will be public-address announcers correctly pronouncing her name at meets. Starks often is referred to as “Sonya.” The one time they got it right, Marquez said, was at the CIF finals.
That’s a nonissue at Crawford. Saniyah is a name they’re unlikely to forget.
“She’s a once-in-a-decade talent,” Marquez said.
That goes for the person, too.
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