LARAMIE – At the time, there wasn't a track in La Jara, Colorado, or a cross country program at Centauri High School.

Jim Sanchez started running anyway. His long and at times excruciating path, which began on rural farm roads and continued for over two decades at 7,220 feet, has led him into the Wyoming Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame.

The longtime UW cross country head coach will be inducted on Sept. 6 as part of the 2024 class.

"It's a celebration of 22 years," said Sanchez, who led the Cowboys and Cowgirls cross country team from 1981-2003. "I'm looking at it like a big iceberg. That night I'm the tip of the iceberg. The only thing you're going to see that night is me above the water surface, but the 22 years underneath is the real deal. The administrative assistants, the coaches, the athletes, all of the big chunks underneath. It's about everybody else with me."

Sanchez attended Adams State in Alamosa, Colorado, which was only a 15-mile run from his childhood home. Joe Vigil, the university's iconic coach, didn't give the local prospect much of a choice when it came to joining his cross country team.

"I had the best teacher in the world," Sanchez said of Vigil, who won 19 national championships at Adams State while also teaching high-level classes. "When I signed up for classes, he saw me and goes, 'Jim Sanchez, cross country practice tonight at 4 o'clock.' I said, 'What's that?'

"After about 20 minutes of saying no he threatened me with my life. There's the walk-ons and the recruits. I might be the only one that got dragged onto the team."

After a successful career competing for Vigil, Sanchez returned to La Jara and started his professional career as an elementary physical education teacher. He and Larry Zaragoza, Adam State's first national champion, came up with the idea to start a cross country program at Centauri High School.

The plan was not well received until Vigil went with his former runners to persuade the superintendent.

"They said the budget was already set, but Coach Vigil said we didn't need a budget," Sanchez said. "All they gave us was a yellow bus. So from there, off we went."

Eleven weeks later, the boys team won a state championship. A couple of years later, Sanchez coached Centauri to the title in the first year of the girls state championship. He also coached the girls track team to three state championships.

During a conversation with New Mexico women's cross country coach Tony Sandoval, who had recruited one of his girls to run for the Lobos, Sanchez was encouraged to apply for a vacant assistant position at UW.

In addition to his success running for Vigil at the collegiate level and coaching at the prep level, Sanchez had recently completed his master's thesis on the effects of altitude training on long-distance running.

"That kind of fit there in Laramie," said Sanchez, who was hired by Jeff Fuller. "Somehow I kind of fit like a glove."

Sanchez led UW to two WAC championships (1986, 1987), seven second-place finishes and eight third-place finishes as head coach. The 1986 Cowboys finished 16^th at the NCAA championships. His favorite team might be the 1984 squad he developed "from scratch," which started the two-decade run of consistency with a fourth-place finish.

"That probably was my best coaching from the point of a lot of them were just a bunch of local Wyoming kids, and we had been working on them for two or three years," Sanchez recalled. "To be honest with you, I think that fourth place was probably the steppingstone, and then from there, I think we went up to second, and then we won it for a couple of years.

"We were always competitive over time, but it just took a lot of hard work. A distance runner doesn't become a distance runner overnight. That's the bottom line. It took a while for a lot of kids, but the kids are the ones that did the work."

Sanchez coached 14 NCAA All-Americans at UW, including three-time WAC champion John Wodny (1986, 1987, 1989) and Cowgirls running pioneer Andrea Everett Blocher, who won the 1983 conference cross country title.

Despite the incredible highs the program experienced in competition, Sanchez is most remembered for keeping the program together in the painful hours and years following the cruel low UW experienced when eight members of the men's cross country team were killed in a car accident near Tie Siding on Sept. 16, 2001.

Sanchez comforted the rest of the team and families of the victims – Nick Schabron and Joshua Jones of Laramie; Kyle Johnson of Riverton; Morgan McLeland of Gillette; Shane Shatto of Douglas; Kevin Salverson of Cheyenne; Cody Brown of Hudson, Colo.; and Justin Lambert-Belanger of Timmons, Ontario, Canada – in the aftermath of the "Wyoming Eight" tragedy and then rebuilt the Cowboys.

"It still haunts me," Sanchez said. "It was really hard. We didn't have too many boys left and every time I start talking about the girls, I tear up just for what they went through and the look on their faces. We still carry the torch and we quietly beat the drums. In the background I can always hear the drums beating and we're always thinking about them."

(Editor's note: This is the sixth in a seven-part series profiling the 2024 UW Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame class. Tickets to the induction banquet, which begins at 6 p.m. on Sept. 6 in the Gateway Center, are now on sale and can be purchased here: https://one.bidpal.net/wyohalloffame2024/welcome)
 
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