Mikey Giguere ready to help Westlake defend state cross country title

Senior is leader of Warriors team

• By Jim Carlisle
• Posted November 11, 2013 at 3:55 p.m.

To learn that Mikey Giguere, Westlake High’s top boys cross country runner, is a skinny little kid may not be a surprise. Most cross country runners are. But Giguere has a deceptiveness to him that many other runners don’t.

Watching him run, with Westlake’s all-white uniform hanging off him, it may be hard to envision him as the No. 1 man for the defending state champion team, but Giguere has power that presents itself at just the right time.

That was particularly evident at Thursday’s Marmonte League Championships at Agoura High. Giguere trailed Simi Valley’s Juan Jimenez for the first two miles of the three-mile race, then took over the lead and won for the third consecutive year. Each of his league meet victories have had similar come-from-behind scenarios.

Giguere won the league race with a time of 15 minutes, 2.98 seconds, exactly one second ahead of Jimenez’s 15:03.98.

“Tactically, that’s what he does,” Westlake coach Joe Snyder said. “He just sits on them and as soon as the thing is over, he knows when to go.

Westlake also won its third straight Marmonte team championship, which serves to give notice that the Warriors are back and ready to put on a staunch defense of its Division 2 state title. They had faltered somewhat in the early part of the season and so had Giguere.

“He’d been dealing with some stuff early on in the season, which he’s overcome, and we’re really pleased for him,” Snyder said. “It’s been a great four years to have him in our program.”

Giguere (pronounced zhi-GAIR) missed part of Westlake’s summer training program and his recovery time kept him out of some early-season invitationals.

“I had this health issue and once that got resolved, I was fine to run,” Giguere said. “I was still running a little bit, but I wasn’t running what the rest of the team was running.

“Basically, the whole time I was just slowly getting back to where I was before, which was kind of frustrating because we have a lot of really great runners and they were just blowing by me.”

The Westlake senior showed he was 100 percent healthy with a second-place finish at the Oct. 25 Ventura County Championships at Lake Casitas. Giguere finished with a time of 15:28, five seconds behind two-time champion Sahm Bazargan of Oak Park.

“I think that was my first really solid race,” Giguere said. “I was really happy with my time. Sahm is a great runner, so I was fine with coming in second.”

Westlake took fourth at the county meet, a week before chalking up another league championship.

At last year’s state meet at Woodward Park in Fresno, the Warriors were delighted with their victory, the results of which were very suspenseful.

“Actually, we had no idea that we (were going to win),” Giguere recalled. “We knew we were close, so we were all really anxious and just hanging around. Once we heard we had won, we were all so happy. All our training and all our work we had put in had paid off.”

It paid off, but it also painted a big red bull’s-eye on their back for this season.

“Every single meet, every single invite, everyone that runs against us, obviously, wants to beat us,” Giguere said. “They’re all trying their best to do that. We were just trying to hold them off at the early part of the season, but toward the end of the season, we started doing better.”

Giguere said he believes the 2013 Warriors are actually in better shape than last year as they head into the CIF-Southern Section prelims and finals the next two Saturdays at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, and the state finals on Nov. 30.

“I think this year’s team is much stronger,” Giguere said. “I think that’s just because of experience and only losing one guy, plus the addition of (junior) Jimmy DeMello. I think this year the league’s a lot faster. I don’t think we were too disappointed that we lost a couple of races. That was just because we weren’t where we wanted to be. But I think we all knew that we had done it before; we knew that Coach was going to get us to peak at the right time.”

After his senior seasons in cross country and track, Giguere hopes to compete in college, with UCLA, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Arizona and Xavier tops on his list. He plans to major in business.

“He’s one of the most coachable kids that I’ve ever had in my program,” Snyder said. “He does everything that I ask him to do and he does it with a smile on his face, and I couldn’t ask for a better kid to coach. It’s been a pleasure for me to coach him all these years.”