In lone season with daughters Peyton and Devyn running together, coaches and parents Karen and Coley Candaele have helped guide Broncos to inaugural NXN berth following at-large selection

By Landon Negri for DyeStat

The bus ride home to Southern California from Fresno was long and suspenseful.

The Vista Murrieta girls cross country runners were waiting on their fate, and they were going to all do it together.
So there they sat for about an hour, gathered in a dark parking lot in front of their school. Then came the brightest moment in the program’s 15-plus-year history.

“We had been doing every mathematical calculation we could think of on the bus,” coach Karen Candaele said. “We had the computers out.”

KAREN CANDAELE INTERVIEW

“We were all super nervous about it, and then we got back to school, and it was like, 7:30, and we were all huddled in a group,” senior Paige Haynes said. “We saw my coach (Coley Candaele) walking over and he looked kind of sad, so I thought, ‘We’re not going to make it.’

“And then he showed us the text that we needed to start packing for Oregon, and we all started screaming, crying and hugging each other.”

Calling it one of the “best texts we’ve ever gotten,” Candaele and Vista Murrieta learned their Division 1 runner-up finish at the CIF-State Cross Country Championships earlier in the day had earned an at-large berth into Saturday’s Nike Cross Nationals meet at Glendoveer Golf Course in Portland, Ore.

WATCH NXN LIVE WEBCAST | GIRLS CHAMPIONSHIP RACE PREDICTIONS

All three of the Golden State’s qualifying girls teams – Claremont, Great Oak and Vista Murrieta – are from Inland Southern California.

Great Oak and Vista Murrieta are longtime Southwestern League rivals. The Broncos have had plenty of success – four times they’ve had a boys or girls team finish in the top five at the Division 1 state final – but have been overshadowed by Great Oak, which won its seventh consecutive title for the girls and fifth straight for the boys Saturday.

That Vista Murrieta earned this invite, in this year, is perfect timing for the Candaele family. Karen’s husband, Coley, stepped down as the school’s head football coach three years ago, in part, to help coach his daughters in cross country and track. This season is the only time that Peyton Candaele, a senior, and Devyn Candaele, a freshman, will be together on the team.

“I was actually driving home one day when Peyton was a freshman, and I’m driving home from football practice going, ‘Why am I doing this?’” Coley Candaele said. “I’m going to have four years of opportunity of this, and I’ll have one year with both of them as a freshman and a senior. Let’s get going now.”

That this couple leads a successful program is no surprise to anyone who has followed distance running in California during the past 30 years.

At Carpinteria High near Santa Barbara, Coley won the 1,600 meters (4:06.26) at California’s state track and field championships in 1990 and went on to earn a scholarship to the University of Oregon. He only did cross country in college; in high school, he quarterbacked Carpinteria’s football team to three CIF-Southern Section titles.

In 2002, Coley led his alma mater to a 14-0 record and championship as its head coach. Vista Murrieta hired him as its founding coach the following spring, and he later coached the Broncos to seven consecutive section championship games and a title win over Corona Centennial in 2011.

Karen Candaele, then known as Karen Hecox, won the Division 2 state cross country title in 1988 for South Hills, following up on her victory in the 3,200 (10:16.14) in the state track championships that year. Later, she was an NCAA champion in the 3,000 meters at UCLA in 1994.

So these two know a little something about running, coaching and mentoring.

“They’re like second parents to me,” said Haynes, a Cal Baptist recruit. “I spend so much time with them. I see them every day. They’ve helped me, and not only mentored me through running, but also school and college and just life. It’s going to be hard next year not having them as coaches.”

At home, you might think the Candaeles are a family that discusses distance running non-stop.

Not so, Coley says.

“Our house is a run-free zone,” he said. “Very little do we talk about running, and … my daughters look to me as ‘Dad.’ They look to my wife more as ‘Coach,’ a little bit more than me, so I have to do all my coaching of them through other coaches. That’s why we have an assistant coach – (former Vista Murrieta standout) Bryce Rausa – who is kind of their personal coach.”

“We like to keep the family and the running separate,” Peyton added, “so we can also enjoy life at home.”
The Candaeles’ philosophies differ at times – Coley prefered to call it “deliberation” – but the program, Karen said, gains from different perspectives.

“I think with Coley, it’s his ability to see the weaknesses and always want to be better,” she said. “Sometimes, my personality is, ‘Gosh, what a great job.’ I have that sense of, ‘You guys are doing amazing.’

“He always has that, ‘Let’s get one step better.’”

That was the mindset going into this season.

A year ago, Vista Murrieta finished third in Division 1 at the state meet and was considered for an NXN berth. That was when it became a realistic goal for 2018, and Coley said they put it on their schedule this past June. From there, it was about developing throughout the season and building toward that end-of-season peak every coach seeks.

“The thing is we’re going to have to run well in November,” Coley said. “We’re not going to worry about and focus on September and October. We’re not even going to run big races in September and October.”

That also meant seeing what they had in Haynes, returning from injuries that sidelined her most of last track season, and Devyn, who Coley and Karen intentionally kept away from the youth track scene in middle school.

“For us, we’ve been through it,” Coley said. “We know that (with) me being an age-group runner, and then me having to stop running because I didn’t like it, because I’d done it so long.”

Devyn did compete in a couple of middle-school meets.

“She ran the middle school track meet, and that’s it,” Coley said. “We never trained her. We never did any running. She did all her running with Thompson Middle School P.E. teachers.”

Yet she became the team’s ace during the course of this season. On Saturday, Devyn led the Broncos in her debut at Woodward Park with a sixth-place finish in 17 minutes, 43.2 seconds.

The whole year, she said, has been a tremendous lesson.

“I just have learned to just go after it and don’t hold back,” Devyn said. “Don’t doubt yourself. You know that you can do it.”

Haynes was next in 18:12.9, followed by some tight pack running. Sophomores Aniya Pretlow (29th, 18:34.8) and Emily Bourque (31st, 18:36.6), seniors Gaby Hubarth (32nd, 18:37.1) and Peyton Candaele (42nd, 18:48.6), and junior Mikayla Fick (52nd, 18:59.4) rounded out the Vista Murrieta lineup.

The Broncos were the first team in the Division 1 final to get its five scorers, as well as all seven runners, through the chute.

“We really didn’t know what Devyn was going to be able to do,” Karen Candaele said of the season. “We knew Paige was coming back from not running track season. We knew our strength was going to be with our numbers and those 3, 4, 5, and 6 positions.”

Though Vista Murrieta has been ranked No. 2 in Division 1 behind Great Oak, most figured getting within 20 points of the Wolfpack would’ve been an accomplishment. A 24-point gap closed in the final mile, though, and the final margin was 79-83.

“We knew it was going to be a close race,” Bourque said. “We were running our hardest. We could feel it.”

It was a bittersweet moment, in some respects, but the reality is the Broncos have been chasing their league mates since Great Oak burst onto the scene with its girls finishing as the state runners-up in 2009. The next year, Great Oak began its current run of eight of nine girls Division 1 state titles.

“The funny thing here in cross country is that we’re surrounded by Great Oak, and the greatness of Great Oak,” Coley Candaele said. “And our kids think we’re just average. We have to explain to them we’re just a little bit better than average. We are just fortunate and unfortunate to have the best team in the state in our league, and we see them everywhere we go.”

Expectations for this weekend are a wild card. Wet and cold weather will be something new to the group competing as Murrieta XC, except for Bourque, the former New Englander.

If anything, Karen said she and Coley are doing the best to live every moment not just for all their runners, but also for this one shot with both daughters.

“My kids have been part of Vista Murrieta since they’ve been born,” Karen said. “For the most part, we’ve been here, they’ve grown up on the football field. They’ve grown up watching that cross country program, and we always talked about that day when we’d have the senior and the freshman on the team for that one year, and it’s here. And like everybody says, it’s going by fast.

“We truly are trying to cherish every moment.”