Girls’ Track Athlete of the Year: Aragon’s Pia Cho

That changed when her friend Marlee Cherkas recruited her to the Aragon track team. Cho hit the ground running, and that impressive footspeed gave an immediate jolt to the junior-varsity sprinting ranks. But it was when her Aragon coaches recommended trying out that footspeed on the long jump course that her track career really took flight.

“We kind of put her in the jumps halfway through the season,” Aragon head coach Greg Alvarado said. “We figured: She has the speed, let’s see if she has the explosion.”

What followed was a quick promotion to the varsity ranks and a historic year for the breakout sophomore. Cho went on to claim the Peninsula Athletic League championship in girls’ long jump and followed that with a podium finish in the Central Coast Section championships.

With Cho’s third-place finish at the CCS finals, she earned a trip to the California Interscholastic Federation state track championships. Not only is she the first Aragon girls’ track athlete to reach the state meet in over 10 years, she used the stage to record a personal record of 18 feet, 3.25 inches in the state trials — rebreaking the Aragon program record she had broke the week before at the CCS meet.

“And as a sophomore too,” Alvarado said. “I’d say it’s very rare. … I think she’s got a lot of potential based upon her talent and based upon her work ethic.”

And while she wasn’t on this publication’s radar to start the year, she quickly emerged to earn Daily Journal Girls’ Track and Field Athlete of the Year honors.

Not a bad title for someone who didn’t even know what long jump was at the beginning of the school year.

“Not at all,” Cho said. “I knew I wanted to run track, but I had no real knowledge of long jump.”

Cho made her first varsity splash April 4 in a dual meet at Mills. She enjoyed four first-place finishes that day, including in the 100-meter dash, the 200 and with the 4x100 relay team. But it was with a 16-foot distance and a first-place finish in the long jump that a star was born.

It was in the days leading up to the meet Cho was introduced to long jump. The discipline was something Aragon was lacking, and Cho’s speed seemed a natural way to produce some extra points for the Dons in the team score at the upcoming dual meet.

“It was really blind, and I jumped like 16-5,” Cho said of her first practice jump. “And [my coach] was like: ‘Yeah, you’re probably going to do something with this.’”

At that point, the Aragon long jump record had stood for nearly 40 years, after Luann Campbell set the mark of 17-7 in 1983.

Just the thought of reaching the 17-foot mark was a daunting goal for Cho, but it took her just a few weeks to get there. On April 20 — just three weeks after she was introduced to the long jump — at a dual meet with Menlo-Atherton, she recorded a distance of 17-1. Another three weeks later, at the CCS trials, she reeled off a 17-2.

With this, she was just getting warmed up. The next week at the CCS finals, Cho was in quite a battle with the rest of the field. Heading into the final round, she was sitting comfortably in second place, knowing the top three placers would earn a trip to the state meet. That’s when things got interesting, as St. Ignatius senior Kate Walsh (18-0) and Silver Creek junior Kristy Huynh (17-8) each topped Cho’s previous best.

With one jump remaining, Cho put herself into the Aragon record book with a distance of 17-9.5, surging into third place and earning herself a trip to the state championships.

“I was just immediately kind of in shock,” Cho said. “I was just ecstatic because on that same jump, I had broken the school record and my coaches were cheering, and my teammates were coming up to me. Yeah, it was really just a cool moment.”

At the CIF state meet trials, Cho dueled to another exciting finish en route to rebreaking the school record. Her top distance of 18-3.25 just missed the top-12 cut to reach the finals. The sophomore finished 13th overall.

“It was exciting,” Alvarado said. “That’s all I can say.”

Cho has since caught the track-and-field bug. She is already planning on running for the Aragon cross country team next season. As a warmup for that, she’s got another prestigious meet to attend to as she recently qualified in long jump for the USATF National Junior Olympics to be held in Sacramento in late July in her first season with The Race Continues Track Club.

And to think, just a few months ago, Cho was merely a rookie blip on the junior-varsity depth chart, with no higher aspirations than to run as fast as she could.

“Yeah, I was pretty surprised just because from the beginning of the season, my coach made it clear he wasn’t going to bring anybody up (from junior-varsity),” Cho said. “But it was definitely a nice surprise.”