Athlete of the Week: Schmidt steps up for CdM

Almost every day this cross-country season, Corona del Mar High senior Lilly Schmidt issued a not-so-subtle reminder to her teammates and her coach.

Schmidt constantly talked about returning to the CIF State Championships. But in the eyes of CdM Coach Bill Sumner, Schmidt was not always putting in all the work that she could to get there.

Sumner said that Schmidt is one of the most stubborn kids he’s ever coached. At one practice in the middle of the season, he said other things that Schmidt found hard to take. With around 20 CdM cross-country runners around, both boys and girls, Sumner called her out.

“He told me that I wasn’t giving everything I had,” Schmidt recalled. “You can ask the entire team. He sat there and he derailed me for 35 minutes, telling me that I had so much more potential, that I was taking advantage of myself and my team.”

This is not usually Sumner’s modus operandi. Plus, he’s known Schmidt since she was a little kid, when she would come to watch her older sister Claire run at CdM. Claire was a talented 400-meter runner in track before graduating in 2009.

But Sumner felt like something needed to be said.

“She’s like family to me,” Sumner said of the younger Schmidt sister. “I didn’t call her out for me, I called her out for her. She got mad at me, and I tossed her the keys. I said, ‘You better start running your team, because they’re falling apart.’ It was a hard way to do that, but she did it.”

Yes, she did it indeed, pushing herself to a point that she never had before. And, as CdM prepares to compete in the CIF State Championships at Fresno’s Woodward Park on Saturday, it is Schmidt that is a big reason why the Sea Kings are making their second straight appearance at the state meet.

The Daily Pilot Athlete of the Week was 20th individually in Division 3 (18:53) last weekend at the CIF Southern Section Finals at Mt. San Antonio College. She helped the Sea Kings not only place fifth in Division 3 as a team, but also second among all Orange County teams that were competing. Only Esperanza, the Division 3 champion, was faster.

Schmidt’s time in the CdM program is a story of perseverance. She emerged as the Sea Kings’ top runner as a freshman, yet that was a season that ultimately ended in disappointment, as CdM failed to make state for the first time in program history. It happened again in Schmidt’s sophomore year.

“It was a lot to hear,” Schmidt said. “I thought I wasn’t going to go to state in my four years. It’s great to go two years now … A lot of me wanted to prove to him that we have the skills and the talent on this team to go to state.”

As a junior, Schmidt had personal adversity to overcome, after suffering a stress fracture at the Sunny Hills Invitational. She broke the second and third metatarsal in her left foot and missed six weeks of the season.

“It was absolutely awful for me,” she said. “I was on crutches for three weeks, in a boot for two … [but] I made a promise to my team that I would be back at the [starting] line at state. So, for the next six weeks, I did everything I could do to come back without running or putting pressure on my foot. I cross-trained, I went to the gym every day, I even got an ultrasound bone healing system to heal my foot.”

Schmidt made it back a meet earlier than state, and was CdM’s third finisher at the CIF Southern Section Division 3 finals. She helped the Sea Kings return to state by the narrowest of margins, placing seventh as a team. The top seven teams moved on.

This year, there wasn’t as much suspense at Mt. SAC. Credit CdM’s top runner, junior Raquel Powers, as well as the senior co-captains of Schmidt, Jacqueline Choe and Hannah Crane. Senior Katie Correnty finished fifth, making four seniors in the top five.

Individually, Schmidt’s races have gotten much better since Sumner called her out a few weeks ago. As a team, she is excited for the Sea Kings to return to the state meet.

They were not ranked in the top 10 teams in Division 3 this week by PrepCalTrack.com, but Schmidt knows her team’s potential. Last year, after finishing seventh in CIF Southern Section Division 3, they took ninth at state.

“I don’t want to go backward, I want to go up,” she said. “I want a podium [top-three finish]. If instead of all of us having a good day, we all have a great day, we could have a chance at the podium for Division 3.”

These are lofty goals, but Schmidt also is stubborn in evaluating her team’s talent. Although it has been an up-and-down season, which included tying for first with Woodbridge at Pacific Coast League finals but settling for runner-up status due to the sixth runner tiebreaker, CdM is peaking at the end.

As far as her relationship with Sumner, all Schmidt can do is smile. They play off each other well.

“I do everything he tells me to do, I just put up a small little argument at first,” she said. “I will argue about some of the things, but I always end up doing them in the end.”

Even some of Sumner’s terminology during the season would bother the stubborn Schmidt.

“He says these things like, ‘If we go to state,’ and I get so annoyed,” she said. “It’s not if we go to state, it’s when we go to state. I will take this team there. It’s everything I wanted to do.”

She has done that. And after she graduates she also wants to run in college, preferably at a school in California or Texas.

In the future, Schmidt might think back to that day when her high school coach called her out in front of her peers. But even now, she knows it has been beneficial.

“It really, really hurt me at first,” she said. “Now that it’s been a couple of weeks, I can look back and say that yeah, it still sucks what he did to me, but it’s only helped me that much more. That was pretty rough to go through, but I can only see the good side to it now. You can either say, ‘I give up,’ or ‘I’m using this to motivate me.’ And I used it to motivate me.

“I didn’t like one second of it,” she added with a smile, “until I got the results.”

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Lilly Schmidt

Born: Feb. 17, 1998

Hometown: Newport Beach

Height: 5-foot-3 1/2

Sport: Cross country

Year: Senior

Coach: Bill Sumner

Favorite food: Pasta

Favorite movie: “Pitch Perfect”

Favorite athletic moment: As a freshman, out-kicking Bethan Knights of Northwood in a track dual meet to win the 1,600-meter race.

Week in review: Schmidt was CdM’s second finisher at the CIF Southern Section Division 3 championships at Mt. San Antonio College on Nov. 21, her time of 18:20 helping CdM place fifth in Division 3 and return to the state meet.