Athlete of the Week: Westmoor's Javen Young

Young, however, didn’t seem to mind the rain. And on his his final approach of the day, he was utterly oblivious to it.

“I didn’t even notice,” Young said. “It’s been pouring since I got here.”

On the same day the Kentucky Derby was being run over 2,000 miles away, Young evoked the horse racing term “mudder” by launching himself 19 feet, 11 inches. That would be a modest distance on a normal day. But on this rainy Saturday, it was enough to be crowned the PAL individual champion in the boys’ long jump.

It has also earned the Westmoor junior the title of Daily Journal Athlete of the Week.

“He’s competitive,” Westmoor head coach Ron DiMaggio said, “and just does a really good job in the rain. And, where everybody else is complaining, he’s popping.”

DiMaggio is in his 46th season as Westmoor’s head coach. In that time, he has led some monster teams. The height of PAL success for the Rams was in 2004 and ’05 in winning back-to-back Bay Division dual-meet championships.

To find the last Westmoor long jumper to capture a PAL individual championship at the year-end postseason meet, one has to go back to that era. Jaime Gonzalez last topped the podium in the discipline with back-to-back long jump titles in 2005 and ’06. Since then, only one Westmoor boys’ athlete previous to Young took home an individual championship in a field event, when Dominic Chavarria won the PAL pole vault title in 2013.

Sure, over the past two years, some have come close. Last season, Benicio Labuguen took second place in the boys’ triple jump. And in 2022, Jonathan Berania placed second in the boys’ triple jump. And Westmoor has celebrated recent success in track events, with Brevan Rohde in 2021 capturing two championships, in the boys’ 110 hurdles and 300 hurdles, along with a first-place run in the 4x400 relay. But Young is the first Westmoor boys’ track athlete to top the podium in a field event since before he ever wandered onto a track.

“I didn’t expect to win, I was just trying to jump 20 feet,” Young said.

DiMaggio said he didn’t expect Young to win either, not after the junior was seeded sixth after the preliminaries. He wasn’t alone, though. Westmoor had four jumpers make the cut of 24 finalists, including Labuguen, Waynstan Aung and Ceasar Contreras.

And, in addition to DiMaggio, first-year jumps coach Ronnie Saw, a 2018 Westmoor graduate, was helping navigate the Rams.

“Javen’s been great,” Saw said. “Just like every other jumper I’ve had the pleasure of coaching, they have an incredible work ethic where they just want to learn. … They were already good jumpers, they were just missing a little bit of something. And what’s great about them is they pick it up really quick.

“The big improvement for Javen is the way that he finishes,” he said. “Javen has an incredible speed coming in. You can throw any sprinter onto the runway, they’ll jump far. Javen has the speed, we just have to fix his mechanics. He has the pop. He can probably dunk next year for someone being under 6 feet. But for him to be able to learn how to finish, and actually execute at a meet, is what sets him apart.”

The rest of the field wasn’t far off from Young’s first-place jump. Aragon’s Jeremy Gosch took second, and Jefferson’s Brendan McKittrick third, each with top jumps of 19-10. Hillsdale’s Trajan King took fourth at 19-9. Mills’ Jaeden Vazquezz was fifth at 19-6 1/2.

Young — who also took fifth place in the triple jump — had one thing going for him that hardly no one else in the field did as the rain began to hammer him on his final long jump of the day. With the rain and the cold, it was as though he brought his hometown weather with him.

“The rain is definitely a hinderance because it’s super cold,” Young said. “But I’m used to the cold because I’m from Daly City. So, it’s always cold.”