#SDSportsAwards, boys cross country: Lincoln's Gabe Peters defined by confidence, drive

Gabe Peters’ first race at Lincoln High School was at the junior varsity level, at the Mack Butler Cross Country Invite, and he wasn’t entirely happy to be there.

Peters, a junior, had started running track full-time at Patrick Henry Middle School, where his performance in the mile caught Lincoln head cross country coach Eric Pooley’s attention. He could have put Peters on the Patriots’ varsity roster right away, but Pooley opted to try to motivate Peters and try to see how he’d respond when he had something to reach for.

“I was kind of mad,” Peters said. “So I ran really hard and I ended up having an all right time.”

He won the 4,000-meter race in 14:05, and that forced Pooley’s hand.

“After that, it’s like ‘Well, you can’t keep him stashed down there for too long,’” Pooley said.

Peters has converted that early promise into plenty of memorable results, winning an individual title in the Class AA race at the most recent state cross country meet and placing 17th at the prestigious Roy Griak Invitational last fall, and he’s the South Dakota Sports Awards boys cross country Athlete of the Year.

MORE: See other winners of the S.D. Sports Awards

“More than anything, I think he’s got the rare ability to say I’m going to do it and actually try to do it,” Pooley said. “And he’s got the mental toughness. A lot of times in distance running, a lot of doubt creeps in, but he believes in himself and believes in his abilities.”

Peters hasn’t been part of any sort of cross country revival at Lincoln: The Patriots were one of the strongest programs in the state when he got there, and he had older runners like Will Lauer, now running at Stanford, and Nathan Schroeder, now at Augustana, to help extract the best times from his ample talent.\

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“Every day I’d come home beat and go to bed like two hours early,” Peters said.

He worked up to training with Lauer and company by his sophomore year, though, and his times started to plummet. He dropped more than a minute off his time at the Nike Cross Nationals Heartland Regional at Yankton Trails Park from his freshman to sophomore year.

Peters is now the Patriots’ clear number one. He ran more than a minute faster than his closest teammate at the 2015 state cross country championship. That has forced Pooley to take a different approach to motivating Peters, one that no longer relies on faster teammates or the dangling possibility of a spot on the varsity squad. Now it’s a matter of reaching a certain level on the national scene, or winning a regional meet, or running at a Division I school, like one of the Big Ten squads that Peters has looked at.

He knows what he has to do to keep improving through his senior season: The same thing that got him where he is now.

“Training,” Peters said. “Miles. Just keep running.”