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Sports

Trevian to Watch: Julie Jackson

Cross country senior talks loud at school, focused and driven on race day.

Like many athletes, New Trier cross-country and track star Julie Jackson likes to keep to a routine on days she competes.

 The senior listens to her iPod, eats the same pre-race meal—toast with peanut butter and banana slices—and keeps to the same stretching routine. She says it helps what are pretty intense nerves as she steps to the line.

Earlier: Check out our entire list of New Trier Athletes to Watch.

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And while her race-day preparation is flawlessly routine, her teammates and coaches notice something starkly different about her personality when she’s readying for a race.

She’s silent.

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Now for most athletes that might seem normal, but for Jackson it’s like watching Robin Williams suddenly decide to do silent films. Go to a Trevian practice and you hear Jackson’s voice the loudest. Walk the New Trier halls and according to head coach John Burnside, she’s a jokester.

“Sometimes I’ll get really quite and I’m normally pretty talkative on the team and my stomach I definitely get butterflies before the races,” Jackson said.

“Pretty talkative” could be a slight understatement. Then again, understating the obvious might be a theme for this year’s Trevian squad.

In the preseason rankings on Dyestat.com, a website dedicated to ranking high schools sports’ teams, has New Trier ranked second in the state after they took sixth place in 2010 and return their top seven runners this season.

Jackson, like many of her teammates, is trying to keep focused on the present. Though the Trevians are expected to be contenders for the state title, they are focused on early-season meets to help gauge their training.

“We’re definitely keeping it [a state title] in the back of our head but right now we’re just going to focus on the meets that are ahead and see how that progresses,” Jackson said.

The good kind of inconsistency

High school cross-country teams the caliber of New Trier will commonly train to peak at the state meet and don’t expect to run their best times at meets in the middle of the season.

But Jackson was somewhat of a distance-running anomaly last season. In every cross-country meet during the 2010 season she ran a personal best time through the state meet.

In other words her time kept improving—something Burnside says he has rarely seen, if ever.

“That’s not a trend you can continue,” Burnside said with expectations that her training this season will cause her to run slower times in lesser meets.

“[But] I expect her to be better than she was a year ago. She’s a hard worker, she’s gained a lot of experience and she’s simply becoming a better athlete.”

Killer instinct

It may be difficult for on-lookers to meet Jackson in school and peg her as a standout athlete, but venture to a cross-country race and you’ll see why.

Burnside said Jackson was as driven as any member of the Trevian squad who possesses a natural talent both on the cross country course and on the track.

Jackson joined the Trevian cross country squad as a sophomore on what she called “a whim.” But quickly she found distance running to be her forte. Despite limited training and a novice knowledge on how to use her superior athleticism, Jackson was running varsity cross country by the end her sophomore season.

As a sophomore on track, she was running workouts with the top distance runners. Now she possesses the racing knowledge that has gotten her looks from several Division III schools.

“My mentality at the very last straight away is to just spring as hard as I can,” Jackson said. “Because those one or two points can make a difference.”

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