Fall has meant football for most of Luke Johnson’s life. But not this past fall.
In his senior year at High School North, Johnson left the quarterbacking to his brother, Shane, and jumped into running year-round, when he joined the boys’ cross country squad.
“There were a few factors,” said Luke. “Last year for football, I was actually out the whole season with a stress fracture in my back. I was out for six months, and it took a really long time to heal. I didn’t want to get reinjured, and at the time I was looking to run in college. I figured it would help my times in the spring.”
Johnson expects to reap the benefits of the longer cross country distance training during the indoor track and field now and the outdoor track and field season this spring.
Up until this year, Johnson had been suiting up for football every fall. He took to his new fall sport quickly.
“I don’t know if there’s physically a lot of crossover, but mentally there’s a lot of similarities between cross country and football,” Johnson said. “For one, the team aspect. Doing things for your team and making sacrifices for your team. That’s a big one that I started to learn in football, and it was very similar in cross country.”
Johnson helped the Knights cap their year with a fifth-place finish at the Meet of Champions on Nov. 23.
“For some reason, we did think we were at least third, not as low as fifth,” he said. “I don’t know if disappointment is the right word. We ran our hardest that day and I think we were looking for more. It just didn’t work out.”
The goal represented an enormous jump in expectations for a North group that last year didn’t make it past the Group 3 state meet. Its only individual Meet of Champions qualifier from a year ago, Vedang Lad, graduated, but bringing in Johnson was a huge boost.
“If you weren’t training with our team for the entire season and during the summer, you wouldn’t see how competitive the guys are and how badly they wanted it,” Johnson said. “A lot of these guys were freshmen last year. Nikhil (Makker), Jeffrey (Chen), Anish (Agrawal), they matured a lot and they really had some big shoes to fill and they did it. I couldn’t be more proud of them.
“And also, one of our juniors, Caleb Birnbaum, he really stepped up this year and played a huge leadership role. We had a lot of guys step up and we had a lot of guys that were really hungry to win, and that were super competitive and super determined and they came every day to practices and worked their butts off.”
Johnson was the team’s No. 1 from start to finish of the season, and for most of the year he placed first or second in every race he entered. That helped the Knights replace Lad in the lineup.
“Luke ran faster than I thought he would,” said Knights head coach Brian Gould. “He had a fantastic season. I don’t know if anybody has had a debut year like that. He put himself up there with the all-timers pretty much right away.”
Johnson placed second at the Mercer County Championships in 15:36 to help the Knights win their first county title in 10 years. He placed second at the Central Jersey Group 3 state meet in 15:53, and fourth at the Group 3 state meet as the Knights earned their MOC berth by placing second. At the MOC, he was 12th against the top runners in the state to lead WW-P North to its top-five team finish.
“Other teams at the beginning of the season may not have thought that we could be in contention for Meet of Champs, but we were,” Johnson said. “We were pretty adamant that we could do things like that.”
The Knights were happy to finish with a good team effort, even if they didn’t place as highly as they had hoped.
Johnson came into the season unsure what he could do. Prior to the season, he had done one cross country 5k race in his life, a charity race in Pennsylvania.
“The only time I ran an all-out 5k before this year was in eighth grade,” Johnson said. “It’d been a while.”
Johnson started to ramp up for his first season of cross country in the summer. Johnson had only raced the two-mile in track a handful of times, and getting him to adjust to the longer 5k race distance for cross country was paramount to his success. Preparation this summer was much different than getting ready for football, or even getting ready for track season.
Johnson got some positive feedback that his training was paying off early in the season. His early success gave him confidence.
Sustaining it to the end was the trickier part. Johnson said he would have liked to finish the year with some faster times, but it was in the end that his inexperience in cross country caught up.
“He just ran out of gas a bit, but that’s on me, not on him,” Gould said. “What’s interesting, because it’s his first year and he ran so fast, he went immediately into racing at a high level, which takes its toll on a kid over the course of a year. But he never stopped battling, never stopped fighting. He’s such a competitor. I was very, very proud of him.”
Gould saw a determination that made him a good example for teammates even if they had more experience in cross country.
“He stepped seamlessly into a leadership role and he had that quarterback in the huddle presence about him,” Gould said. “I don’t know if he took that from football or it’s part of his personality. I never coached him in football. I can’t tell you what he brought from football. I can tell you he’s a great competitor, a great athlete, and a great teammate so having him add that to our team this year—especially to a team that’s pretty sophomore heavy – he made a lot of contributions on the course, but also gave some really inexperienced kids direction.”
Johnson in turn relied on his cross country teammates to push him and help him adjust to his new sport. It made for a symbiotic relationship.
“I had a good confidence level in general,” Johnson said. “I think that comes from training really hard with my teammates. That reassured my confidence level. I was very nervous and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. As the season went on, I started to get a little more confidence. We couldn’t get overly confident because that leads to bad things as well. My confidence did go up as we progressed.”
Johnson emerged as a terrific cross country runner who will take his talents to the University of Pennsylvania, where he will run cross country and track. The benefits of doing cross country this year could show quickly on the track.
“I’m definitely looking forward to it,” Johnson said. “That’s all Coach Gould keeps talking to me about is I have a lot more aerobic capacity now. A lot of people like Sean Dolan and Liam Murphy, they started cross country a little late and the gains they saw on the track were immense. They went from being good to top of the country good. I’m looking forward to hopefully having that happen to me as well. But that doesn’t just come. I’m still going to have to work for it. I’m looking forward to that.”
Any big jump he makes on the track will have him crediting some of the higher running demands that cross country made. It’s one of the reasons that he made a switch in his final year.
“I had a great experience in cross country,” Johnson said. “It was a lot of fun. I told Gould, I think I’m still more of a track guy. If I had to choose, it’d be track. I had a good time in cross country and it was a good experience.”
West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North’s Luke Johnson.,
