One of the more popular reasons someone has for joining any extracurricular activity is more often than not the pure enjoyment of it, which is normally combined with the fact that it is something they are good at. People enjoy doing things they are good at. That being said, you can’t be expected to be good at something right out the gate, from arts to athletics, it takes hard work to achieve greatness in any field. Especially in a field you never previously saw yourself in before then.

Jimmy Guerrero, senior, is proof of this. While Guerrero had originally been on the football team in his freshman year, a sport he’s been playing since the age of 4, an injury turned him away from the sport. Guerrero had injured his collarbone and he found himself turning in his uniform all together, retiring from football all together. 

However, this wasn’t the end of his time participating in school sports teams at Downey High School. Coach Enriquez, who no longer coaches at Downey, sought him out after having seen him training for football, and suggested he join the track team. And in his second semester of freshman year, Guerrero joined and ended up doing pretty well in the sport. This eventually led to him joining cross country in his sophomore year. 

At first Guerrero shared the common trait of hating to run with most other people, finding himself hating how much running they were made to do to prepare for competitions. After all, running was never his sport, it had been football for the longest time. 

Though this didn’t turn him away from the sport, and over the course of his next 2 years at Downey he found himself ever so surely enjoying and loving cross country. He even found a new goal, to break the school’s record for fastest time running in cross country. 

Working hard and practicing from meet after meet, Guerrero’s hard work finally paid off on Saturday, September 4th, 2021. During the first meet of the cross country season, Guerrero ended up accomplishing his dream for the last 2 years of breaking the school’s record for fastest time in cross country with 14.26 minutes. 

“I was so excited and shocked, it was so overwhelming,” Guerrero explains when asked how it had felt to learn he had accomplished such a feat, “I was so happy to see how my hard work had paid off.” 

While some unfortunate and unforeseen circumstance has led to Guerrero leaving the football field, he ended up finding solace on the track. Guerrero is an example to everyone that even though unfortunate things may happen to us, that should never stop us from achieving greatness, even in something we never imagined we’d end up doing.