Daily Journal Boys’ Athlete of the Year: Crystal’s Benjamin Bouie

Crystal junior Benjamin Bouie enjoyed plenty of sports growing up. Prior to arriving on campus at the little school with the mythical mascot three years ago, he frolicked through the usual fare of soccer, basketball, swimming, and a little baseball.

It was the sport Bouie didn’t enjoy, however, that led him to discover his passion.

During sixth grade at the Crystal Springs Uplands middle school, he tried his hand at flag football. It turned out, as the adage goes, Bouie was all feet. He frequently dropped and fumbled the ball, the punishment for which was running a lap.

“I was so bad, I just ended up running laps the entire practice,” Bouie said. “So … I ended up running cross country.”

Bouie arrive on the high school campus to lead Crystal to a burgeoning small-school dynasty on the cross-country circuit, fronting the Gryphons’ back-to-back CIF Division V state championships in 2022 and ’23. He would also run his way into the school’s record books as the first Gryphon ever to earn a Central Coast Section track and field championship with a blistering personal record in the 1600 meters of 4 minutes, 6.92 seconds, a CCS championship meet record and considered one of the fastest times in CCS history.

Bouie’s body of work throughout his junior season is also deserving of the title as Daily Journal Boys’ Athlete of the Year.

Key piece of the team

Not that Bouie was a one-man show. Far from it. The two Division V boys’ cross country state championships demonstrate just how deep head coach Albert Caruana’s program is. It isn’t just the boys’ team. The Crystal girls concurrently won back-to-back Division V state championships. With the arrival in 2021 of freshmen Bouie, Tarik Baker and Oliver Boesch, however, Caruana knew the program was in for a wild ride.

“It just wasn’t Ben,” Caruana said. “There were three middle schoolers who were doing really well in middle school, and I was looking forward to them coming to our campus. I knew they were good, but I didn’t know they were going to be this good.”

It was Baker, who Bouie credits as being the prime motivator of the group, who had the more notable running background. Baker would often tell stories about competing with the Peninsula Flyers Club, a cross-country club team based in Palo Alto. Bouie was so intrigued, he decided he wanted to join the Crystal middle school cross-country team in eighth grade, but that plan got shelved due to the COVID pandemic.

The summer of love

With the world trying to return to normal in the summer of 2021, Bouie found his calling. Not only did he, Baker and Boesch jump at the chance to join Crystal’s varsity team for summer workouts, stars collided when they arrived at Crystal’s primary training site at Sawyer Camp Trail to find an already thriving Gryphons cross-country program, one that included then incoming sophomores Furious Clay and Kaiya Brooks.

“Getting pushed like I’d never been pushed before, and kind of falling in love with that process,” Bouie said. “I’m kind of nostalgic about that summer. … I think that was probably the moment when I wanted to take it serious because I learned that I loved it more than I loved anything else before.”

The nostalgia would pour over to Bouie’s freshman cross-country season, as the Crystal boys ran their way onto the CIF Division V state podium for the first time in program history.

“I’ve been coaching cross country obviously at Crystal for a long time, and the podium just eluded us,” said Caruana, who took over the program in 1996.

The boys’ team earned three previous individual state medalists, with Nick Neely taking seventh in 2001 and second place in ’02; followed by Nicky Medearis taking second in 2017. The girls’ team also earned three state medals, with Katie Scangos taking eighth in 1997; Aimee Raleigh ninth in 2006; and Brooks fourth in 2019. The Lady Gryphons also reached the podium with a second-place team finish in Division V in 2005.

The boys’ team, however, had never cracked the top three.

Bouie, Gryphons break through

That changed in 2021 when Crystal scratched and clawed into third place in Division V, with the final standings recalibrating at the tail end of the race on the five-mile course at Woodward Park in Fresno to show the Gryphons leapfrogged Francis Parker-San Diego by a mere two points on the leaderboard.

“We got super lucky,” Caruana said.

Crystal’s ascent to the top of the Division V cross-country podium came one year later. Bouie, as a sophomore, led the Gryphons with a fourth-place finish in 15:36. The program’s repeat in the fall of 2023 saw Bouie claim a remarkable second-place finish in 15:04.6, with two Crystal runners medaling in the race; Baker also broke the top-10 cutoff time of 15:34.8, good for 10th place.

As it turned out, Bouie was only getting warmed up for one of the great individual track-and-field seasons in Crystal history.

“Where before he was very good in our league, very good in our section, and did very well in our division,” Caruana said, “but this year he put himself among the very best runners in the state, and potentially in the country. He went from being a very good runner to being one of the elite runners in the state now.”

Slow start, fast finish

Bouie’s junior season on the track got off to a rough start though. Due to a nagging foot injury, his cross-training was limited in the offseason. This led to lackluster performances in his first two distance races of the season — he settled for 16th place in the 1,600 at the Dan Gabor Invitational, March 6, in 4:32.27. Two weeks later, he took 11th place in the 3,200 at the Dublin Distance Fiesta, March 15, in 9:15.30.

“If you look at the track season as a whole, in the beginning, it was very ordinary times,” Caruana said. “A much slower start than he’s had in the past.”

It ain’t how your start, though. It’s how you finish. And Bouie finished his junior season with a bang.

Because he was dedicated to running with his teammates in the 4x800 relay, he settled into the 1,600 as his primary individual race. That 4x800 team of Bouie, Baker, Boesch and Dean Wu accomplished the extraordinary in its own right, as the foursome raced to titles at both the West Bay Athletic League Championships, April 30, in 7:51.28; and to Crystal’s second all-time section title at the CCS Championships, May 18, in 7:51.61.

Bouie still had plenty left in the tank to take home the 1,600 championships at both meets. Not that he remembers much about the historic 4:06.92 performance at the CCS Championships at Gilroy High School. It was a torturous pace that saw Bouie chasing Palo Alto senior Grant Morgenfeld, who started off the opening gun like lightning, from the outset.

“Grant is an incredible runner,” Bouie said. “I was trying to hang on for three-and-a-half laps, and I remember thinking in the middle of the race: ‘I’ve never felt this bad before in a mile race.’ … I was just trying my best to hang on.”

That’s when Bouie relied on his training, had faith in his adrenaline kick, and didn’t hesitate for a second to keep pace with Morgenfeld.

“Running wise, obviously he’s really talented,” Caruana said. “But he’s also super tough. Wherever he needs to be in the race, he’s there.”

Coming off the final turn, Bouie hit the zone all competitive runners work their entire lives to find.

“For three laps I kind of dug deep and kind of tried to hang on, and with the last lap it was just a matter of getting it done,” Bouie said.

Bouie said he was aware since his freshman year Crystal had never won a CCS championship.

Some have come close. In 2005, Madeline Evans earned two third-place finishes — with Sydney Blankers, Imani McElroy and Caroline Scanlan in the girls’ 4x100 relay; and in the girls’ 400 — in 2018, Nick Marsano took third in the boys’ 400; and in 2022, Clay took third in the boys’ 800. Brooks previously came the closest, taking second place in the 3,200 in 2022.

“But I was never super worried about breaking a record or being the first as a champion,” Bouie said. “That was never really something I spent time thinking about, but it was something I think I still really wanted. And it was really gratifying to see it become a reality in a race I’m still kind of processing.”

It was the exhaustion from his leaving everything on the track that turned his extraordinary bell lap into a blur. Nonetheless, Bouie had little time to process the historic feat because there was more work to do. Qualifying for his first individual race at the CIF Track and Field Championships, May 25, at Buchanan High School in Clovis, Bouie again raced his way onto the podium, taking fourth place in the 1,600 in 4:10.40.

Bouie embraces the accomplishments, but as he looks toward his upcoming senior season, he doesn’t dwell on them. The fast times and medal prestige are mere scenery, after all. Running, says Bouie, is its own reward.

“I’ve always loved running,” Bouie said. “I feel like it was always something fun. I like feeling fast.”