PHOTOS ― L - R: Andy and Kevin Ramos-Glew at KUA, summer 2008; Andy with Buz Morison (left) and Scrib Fauver (right); Andy with his mother, Betsy.
When he tried out for the varsity soccer team before his second year at KUA, his skills didn’t yet match his passion for the sport, and he ended up on the JV. However, something happened in preseason that raised a few eyebrows: his timed-mile fitness test. “It was just ludicrous how fast it was,” says Scrib Fauver, the varsity soccer coach at KUA. “And he wasn’t even trying.”
Regardless of how I did [in cross-country] that fall, I was going to come back to the soccer team the next year.” Something unexpected happened, though. “He won his first meet,” says Morison, who coached Wheating in both his junior and senior years. “That was just a couple weeks into running, and it didn’t really make sense for him to win.”
Fauver floated the idea of cross-country by Wheating, who was having none of it. A year later, though, the scene repeated itself.
It was an impressive performance, but it hadn’t been against all the best competition in the area.
“This time it was truly ridiculous how far ahead he was,” remembers Fauver. “And he wasn’t racing, he was just goofing around. He wasn’t winded, nothing. He’s standing with me at the end, talking to me about this and that, plenty of leftover breath. It didn’t take a genius to see that this kid could run. Anyone in my shoes would’ve noticed that there’s something funny here. He’s way too good at this without training.” Crosscountry came up again, and . . . “well, he blew me off again, actually.”
“The next race we had was a bigger race,” Morison recalls, “and he won that one too. But we still hadn’t met the whole field of runners. Then next week we did, and he won that one. It was kind of weird, you know? For him to be that good right away.”
This time around, Fauver enlisted the help of others in the community who thought running might give Wheating some added focus and drive. He spoke to Buz Morison, the cross-country coach at KUA, and Kevin Ramos-Glew, a runner himself who had a good relationship with Wheating and his friends. The pair gently encouraged Wheating to give this other sport a shot.
“I knew he was hemming and hawing on running, and I had done the same thing,” says Ramos-Glew, who told Andy about Steve Prefontaine, the runner from Oregon who set American records in every track event from 2,000 meters to 10,000 meters before his premature death in a car accident in 1975. It was “Pre” who had shown Ramos-Glew, and millions of others, that “you can be cooler running than in any other sport.”
“I was kind of hesitant because I’d played soccer my whole life,” Wheating recalls. “I was convinced that I was going to get there. 4
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Despite the success, Wheating still had his mind on soccer. Throughout the fall, he returned to Fauver, wondering if the running, the fitness, would help him make the soccer team as a senior.
Ramos-Glew’s words struck a chord with Wheating. “He was like, ‘You need to watch this movie—Pre’s the guy who made running cool.’ After I finished that movie, I wanted to go out and run a 10,000-meter race and blow everybody out of the water.” While it wasn’t at 10,000 meters, Wheating was already leaving the competition behind. He didn’t lose a race during his junior year, and when senior year rolled around, sticking with his new sport was a foregone conclusion. “It just flowed naturally,” Wheating shrugs. “Obviously, you can’t really leave something that you’re just naturally good at, so after that I started taking it more seriously.” Another undefeated season followed, and soon people started to take notice. Through KUA’s Dave Faucher, Wheating met Jeff Johnson, a legendary track coach living in Hanover, and the first employee of Nike when the company was founded in the 1970s. Johnson saw Wheating’s promise and put him in touch with the coaches at the University of Oregon, home to one of the best running programs in the country. In fact, it had been Prefontaine’s college. “I didn’t know anything about the history,” says Wheating. The Oregon coaches invited him out for a visit and said they’d cover all his travel costs. “I was totally shocked. And then I found out how incredible the school is for running.”