Track Scars

Track coaches like Billington could relate. The same rule dictated that sports teams needed special permission to travel more than 250 miles for a competition.

Billington hated the rule. And partly, he conceived the La Jolla trip as a pushy way to thumb his nose at it. Billington had found a seemingly nonsensical loophole in MSHSAA's rules: The state would allow Truman to go to California, but only if the team competed in an almost-forgotten form of cross-country competition.

The dual meet.

At one time, dual meets -- races between only two schools -- were so common that a school might participate in three of them in a single week. But over the last 20 years, larger meets -- where many more schools compete in mass runs -- became the norm. Now, dual meets are almost unheard of.

Billington could only remember one or two dual meets that Truman had held in more than a decade.

And the dual meets that did take place, coaches say, evolved into such informal affairs that they could hardly be called "meets" at all. Other coaches say dual meets have become glorified practices.

But Billington had other reasons for making the trip. He wanted Truman's runners to have some fun. Two of them, after all, were his own kids -- his son, Ryan, competed on the boys' team; his daughter, Lindsay, ran for Chris Earley's girls' team.

This impertinent porterhouse asked Billington if anyone had complained that Billington's own kids would benefit from a trip to a swanky town like La Jolla.

"You ever take 14 children across country? You think that's anyone's idea of a family vacation?" he says. Parents, he adds, seemed to understand that Billington wanted the trip to be a culminating experience for someone like senior star Jared Kreissler as much as for his own children.

Planning for the trip began the previous year. Kreissler, now a sophomore runner at Missouri State University (the new name for Southwest Missouri State), says athletes who competed for Billington were accustomed to doing fundraisers for special events. And over the summer of 2003, he and the other jocks raised cash by selling entertainment discount books, asking grocery stores to donate proceeds, doing hard labor and helping the school district by smoothing out a new jogging track at a middle school.

In the spring, Billington had contacted La Jolla High School's athletic director and its coach. With a tentative agreement to make the trip, Billington turned over the La Jolla officials' telephone numbers to his own athletic director, Gary Bressman, and then focused on getting formal permission from MSHSAA.

That was when he made his first mistake, Billington says. He assumed that Bressman would take care of formal arrangements with La Jolla. Billington says that's always the way things had worked in the past.

Earley also assumed Bressman had handled communications with La Jolla. "Clearly, the AD wasn't doing his job to call out there and make sure everything was taken care of," he says.

La Jolla officials told the press in 2003 that they had heard almost nothing from Truman High School before the trip and were actually surprised to hear that the team was still coming for a Thursday, September 18, meet.

In fact, La Jolla really didn't even want to compete.

Billington says that La Jolla made Truman feel welcome and gave the students a grand tour of the impressive campus at the wealthy school, but La Jolla's boys' coach, Chuck Boyer, told Billington that his runners weren't in any shape to race. They had run the night before in a fundraising event, and on Saturday planned to participate in a large, multi-school meet.

"He didn't want them to race, but to do an 8-mile training run with us instead," Billington says.

Immediately, Billington says, he thought about MSHSAA rules. He admits that he was worried. Kreissler, his star runner, was gunning for a possible state championship and a scholarship. "I knew I had to protect his eligibility," he says.

But Billington also had been a coach for 22 years, and he understood Missouri rules intimately. He knew that even such an informal event -- two schools leisurely jogging down to the beach and back -- would qualify as a "meet" according to MSHSAA rules.

Just to be safe, he says, he pulled Kreissler aside and told him that with 1,500 meters left in their casual run, he was to "hit the afterburners."

Billington says today that he should have done more than just tell his kids to kick some ass.

"I should have called our athletic director at that point," he says. "This is where I used poor judgment."

Chris Earley, meanwhile, says that nothing seemed out of the ordinary to him. He'd assumed a dual meet would be informal. The trip had been for fun, after all. Both coaches had been open about that. Before the trip, Examiner sports columnist Bill Althaus had even quoted Billington as saying "I'm going to draw a line in the sand at the beach, and we're going to run against La Jolla High School."

But Kreissler says that what started out as a practice didn't stay that way. "They were trying to compete with us. They kept asking who our best guy was. I wanted to beat their best guy, and he wanted to beat me."