Sukhi Khosla - 2014 Florida Gatorade Boys XC Player of the Year

by Herb Wills

Want to be Florida’s Gatorade Player of the Year in cross country? Maybe you should consider a move to northwest Florida. Since the award was established in 2007-2008, seven different boys have received the honor in cross country and three were from that region. There are seventeen different area codes in Florida, but nearly half of the cross-country Player of the Year recipients had phone numbers that started 850. Leon's Matt Mizereck in 2009-2010, Niceville’s Thomas Howell in 2012-2013, and now Leon's Sukhi Khosla in 2014-2015.

I’m shading the statistics a little bit here by counting athletes rather than years. Although the award has been around for eight years, only seven different individuals have won because Melbourne’s Brian Atkinson won in both 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Atkinson remains the only runner to have been chosen for the award twice. So the boys XC POY has come from Northwest Florida three years out of eight, although there are folks who will argue that it should have been five years out of eight. Most of those folks are in the Panhandle, of course. That’s the nature of an award where the winner is chosen by a committee rather than by the outcome of a race. Whatever the choice, there will always be someone who wants to dispute it.

When it comes to this year’s Gatorade POY, though, Sukhi Khosla hasn’t left much fuel for argument. The Leon senior hasn’t lost a cross-country race in Florida for two years. During those two years he consistently beat the last two cross-country Players of the Year, Thomas Howell (2012-2013) and Sunset’s Nick Diaz (2013-2014). Two of the races in Khosla’s two-year long winning streak were state championships. Venturing out of state in the post-season, he took second at the Nike Cross Regionals Southeast race in Cary, North Carolina, earning a berth at Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Oregon. He placed 35th in the Portland race, capping his high school cross-country career.

If you want to talk about track times, Khosla has run 4:05.96 and 8:59.50 in the 1600 and 3200. But I’m getting ahead of the calendar--track season is still some weeks away, and we’re discussing a cross-country award.

Having trained both Mizereck and Khosla, Leon’s Andrew Wills is currently the only coach to have worked with two of Florida’s Boys Cross Country Gatorade Players of the Year. Very early, Coach Wills marked Khosla as having the potential to match Mizereck.

“The summer before Sukhi was in ninth grade, his workouts were getting really good,” recalled Coach Wills. “I was pretty sure he was a great talent then. Of course, he had an average cross-country season, so I thought I had overestimated him.

“Then he ran 9:35 in track.”

Since then there has been the 8:59.50, two state titles in cross country, and two others in track. And now Sukhi Khosla is Florida’s 2014-2015 Gatorade Player of the Year in Boys Cross Country.

“I'm excited to receive this award,” said Khosla. “To be honest, I thought I was gonna get it last year, but it was harder than I expected, and I was more disappointed when I didn't get it than I thought I would have been. But this year is different! Gatorade is obviously a huge company and has been a part of the world for just under 50 years now, so it's great for a company of its stature to recognize a high school athlete like myself. It's nice to have all the work and time and effort that we all put in to be recognized by something outside of the actual races. It's a great cap to my last high school cross country season, and I feel respected to be chosen for this honor.”

Northwest Florida Correspondent Herb Wills

Herb Wills' running career goes back to the 1971 boys' age-group mile at the Florida Relays. Since losing that race he has won the 1976 Florida High School class 4A cross-country championship, 1979 AAU USA junior titles in cross-country and the 10,000 meters, and the 1989 TAC USA 30K national championship. As a distance runner at Florida State University from 1978 to 1982, he was NCAA All-American three times in track and once in cross country, and won a silver medal in the marathon at the 1981 World University Games. Graduating Florida State with a degree in mathematics, in the following years Wills ran in the USA Olympic Marathon Trials in 1984, 1988, and 1992, and placed tenth in the Boston Marathon in 1989. After more than a few years of duty as a hurdle setter and lane judge at track meets, Wills discovered that the public address announcer not only got to sit down at meets but was also sheltered from the rain. Since that revelation you can hear him with a microphone in his hand at several track and cross-country events in the Tallahassee area. Writing is another activity you can do while sitting down, and Wills has written about running for Racing South magazine and Tallahassee's local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat.

You can read more running related tidbits in his blog at http://troubleafoot.blogspot.com/

Herb Wills NorthWest Florida Reports LINK