Almost all of the high school sports stories we tell in the Daily Southtown are about athletes who win a game. The heroes who push their teams to big victories.
But let’s shift gears and focus on someone who gave up her chance to win and became a hero in a whole different kind of way.
Senior cross country runner Valentina Villarreal was competing for Oak Lawn in the Steelmen Invitational at Channahon Community Park on Sept. 12 when she caught a glimpse of another competitor in distress.
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“We were in a section of the course where there were a lot of bushes and you couldn’t really see anything,” Villarreal said. “I was going forward and I saw this girl on the ground and my first thought was, ‘What’s wrong?’ She was fully laid out.
“I was like, ‘Uh-oh, why’s nobody stopping for her?’”
Villarreal immediately stopped to check on the fallen runner.
“I went over and tapped on her to see if she’d get up and she wasn’t responding,” Villarreal said. “I’d heard of girls passing out during races, but I’d never seen it. And there was no one else around, so it was scary.”
Before long, a couple other runners reached that point of the course and also stopped to help Villarreal, who ended up taking charge again and carrying the load — literally.
“We just decided to try to pick her up,” Villarreal said. “We tried to carry her by her arms and legs and it wasn’t working. One of the girls tried to princess carry her and that didn’t work, either. I was like, ‘Maybe we should get her on my back.’
“She was fully passed out, but we got her on my back like a piggyback and I just kept going.”
Eventually, two coaches saw Villarreal and ran over to help. The injured runner was taken to get medical assistance and Villarreal was back on her way.
“They started checking her heart and her breathing and then they told me just to keep going,” Villarreal said. “I went back to the race.”
Oak Lawn coach Sue Szala wasn’t surprised that Villarreal would act the way she did in an emergency situation.
“Valentina is one of my captains and that’s exactly what I told everyone after this — there’s a reason she’s a captain,” Szala said. “She’s amazing, just a great person, and she’s always willing to jump in whenever anything needs to be done. She has a huge heart.”
Returning to the course, Villarreal had no way to get an update on the injured runner’s condition. She was thankful to get one after finishing the race.
“The girl’s coach came running up to me and said, ‘Thank you,’” Villarreal said. “She was really grateful that I stopped to help and she told me the girl was OK.
“I was like, ‘Oh, thank God,’” Villarreal said. “It was really scary at first. I genuinely didn’t know if she was OK. We literally just left her and kept running so we didn’t know what happened.”
Aside from the relief she felt after the race, Villarreal had a reason to laugh. Amid the confusion of going off course to get the injured girl to safety and then trying to return to the race, Villarreal got sidetracked.
“When I got out of the forest area, a guy told me to just go straight and then I ran into some other girls and realized I was in the wrong spot,” Villarreal said. “So, I had to turn around, but I kept going with the race. I didn’t want to just drop out.
“After the race, coach Szala came up to me and was like, ‘Did you know you went the wrong way?’ So, I told her what happened.”
Villarreal finished the race in 123rd place out of 146 finishers — impressive considering she stopped for several minutes and then spent time running the wrong way.
But she wasn’t worried about the standings. Not when a fellow competitor was in trouble.
“I just felt like I had to do it,” Villarreal said. “Nobody was there. It was one of those areas where there weren’t going to be any coaches. It was just instinct knowing that I had to do something and I couldn’t just leave her there.”
Szala knows what it’s like to be in the heat of the moment in a race when other runners may not have even noticed an injured competitor and kept going anyway.
“A lot of people would be like, ‘I’ve got to compete, this is my time and my score,’” Szala said. “Valentina didn’t even think twice about it. She was like, ‘Nope, this is more important.’
“She was awesome.”
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Szala confirmed it’s a story she will tell all her future runners.
“This is what sportsmanship is,” Szala said. “Always thinking about everybody else. This is what it means to be a captain.”
Villarreal certainly won more than a race that day.