Ashley Navarro stood just outside the Steinert tent at Northern Burlington High School track, watching the best talent in the state swirl around her. She was still coming to grips with the fact she was among them and would be running the 800 meters in a few hours.
“I don’t think any of the coaches thought I was gonna make it this far in the 800,” Navarro said. “I didn’t think I would even be in sectionals in the eight when I started. And then I realized in the second meet this season that I had a really good time. I thought I had a chance, I just wanted to train hard and see what I can do with it.”
She did a heck of a lot with it in a very short time, taking second in the Mercer County Championships, winning the Central Jersey Group III gold medal and taking fifth in the Group III State meet in a school record 2:15.17. She did not reach her goal of re-setting the 800 in the MOC but chalked it up to “just having an off day.”
The season in general, however, was outstanding.
“I was always fast,” Navarro said. “But I didn’t think I’d be this fast. I wasn’t expecting something crazy.”
What’s really crazy is she didn’t run her first individual 800 race until this past winter.
“In the past couple years her stride always looked like an 800 stride,” Steinert coach Mike Giacobbe said. “She was hurt a lot last year, and at the end of the track season I said, ‘Let’s try the 800.’ When Coach (Kyle) Flanagan took over winter track and did an amazing job, she just took off with it. So the combination of his coaching and her drive, all of a sudden boom! An 800 runner emerged.”
Navarro is spawned from Mercer County athletic royalty. Her mom, the former Carol Kokotajlo was a three-sport standout at Steinert in softball, field hockey and basketball. Her dad, Len Navarro, was one of the Colonial Valley Conference’s top pitchers for Notre Dame, and her uncle, Todd Kokotajlo, is a Steinert Athletic Hall of Famer after a career in baseball, soccer and winter track.
Track and field was never what the family was known for, however, until Navarro came along. She grew up playing soccer (and still does for the Spartans), but Len noticed an added dimension to his daughter on the pitch.
“My dad always said, ‘You’re so fast, when you get to high school you should do track,’” Navarro said. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do track, I’m not gonna like it.’”
As so often happens in young lives, the advice of a peer seems cooler than that of a parent.
“The winter of my freshman year, a junior said, ‘You should do track you’re really fast,’” she said. “I said ‘OK,’ and I just did it. I started out, and my 400 time was really good and they just left me there.”
Navarro spent her freshman year learning the nuances of running, noting that she never realized how many things she did wrong while zipping up and down the soccer field. She was strictly a 100, 200 and 400 sprinter until they put her in 4×800 this past winter.
“As she ran those 400s, there was something about just the way she finished that race,” said Giacobbe, a former 800 man at Steinert. “You saw it in her eyes, her determination. I was like, ‘You know what, she’s an 800 runner.’”
That’s not really what a lot of track athletes want to hear. The 800 is one of the toughest races out there; a mixture of speed and distance.
“Everyone loves to hate it,” Giacobbe said. “You get out fast, you get past the 400 mark, you hear the bell go off and you’re excited, but then you’re like, ‘Oh wait a minute, I have to do that all over again! I gotta do a second lap.’ It’s a two-lap sprint. There’s time for maybe 100, maybe 150 meters of strategy and after that you just gotta go. It really separates a lot of so-so runners with the elite runners. I think it’s an elite race.”
Predictably, Navarro had to let it grow on her.
“They wanted me to run the four by eight in the winter because we lost one of our seniors,” she said. “They thought it would be good for me because I did soccer, and it’s like intervals training. When I first started it wasn’t my favorite but I started to realize I was really good at it and I just kept pushing myself to do better. I ended up really liking the race. I think the 800 is my race now.”
She admitted, however, it took some time to get used to that second lap of 400 meters.
“It kind of weighed down on me mentally thinking about it,” Navarro said. “You’re like ‘Wait I’m not done now…another four.’ But you kind of get used to it after a while. When you’re running it so much, it’s just habit and you just keep wanting to go.”
The highlight of Navarro’s season came when she broke the Steinert 800 mark of 2:15.7 by running a 2:15.17 and taking fifth at the groups meet in Bernardsville. It was a goal she had at the start of the season and the third record she was a part of, as she set the 400 mark and was part of a record-setting 4×800 relay team.
Navarro won gold medals in all three at the CJ III meet, running the 400 in 59.98 and teaming with Aidan Sheehan, Samantha Woolf and Lauren Miller to win the 4×800. The following week, the 4×800 set the school mark in 9:40.91, taking third place and advancing to the MOC (where it finished 23rd).
“In the beginning of the year, I set goals for myself to break the school record in the 800 along with the 400 and the 4×800,” Ashley said. “When I broke the record in the 800 and qualified to go to the Meet of Champions it felt amazing to know that I had reached my last goal of breaking my third school record.”
The 4×800 was in disarray after losing two runners from last year, but Navarro and Miller, who reached the MOC as a wild card in the 1,600, stepped in to create a formidable unit.
“The two seniors (Sheehan and Woolf) wanted to get here so bad,” Navarro said. “We told them we were going to get here and get the record, and it happened.”
“Now we have everyone at or under 2:30,” Giacobbe said. “We started early, at the TCNJ High School Open in early April. We won that, we brought our time down to 9:50 at MCT Relays, and we actually stopped running to keep everyone fresh. We dropped another six seconds at sectionals, dropped another three or four seconds at states.”
Running anchor has been Navarro, who has become a central figure in the renaissance of Steinert track & field.
“We’ve had some good additions to our coaching staff but it’s the athletes who bought in,” Giacobbe said. “The athletes finally said, ‘We’re tired of it being a joke’ and they did it.’ They’re the ones doing the workouts, running the meets. They’re like a family, it’s so fun to be around. Sometimes I think I can just put my feet up and watch, it’s amazing to see what they can do.”
It’s especially amazing to watch Navarro, who treats losing as if it’s fatal. She picked up some competitive fire from her parents, but most of it comes from within her own personal furnace.
“I don’t think she needs any help with the inner drive,” said Giacobbe, who feels the sky is the limit for Navarro in the 800 and 400. “She also runs the four by four. She got the baton one race, and I didn’t even have to look at the finish line. I could just tell by the look in her eyes she was going to come in first. She wasn’t going to let anyone near her finish ahead of her. It’s just not allowed to happen. You can’t teach that.”
That attitude doesn’t just apply to meets.
“I hate losing; even in practices when I’m running against somebody, it’s very rare that somebody will beat me in a workout,” Navarro said. “I hate losing even in workouts. Mentally I need to win. And it pushes me further.”
With one year remaining and a likely college career after that, it will be fun to see just how far she gets pushed.
Ashley Navarro runs against Hopewell Valley in April 2017. (Photo by Amanda Ruch.),
