Try to top this for an exit: in his final competition as the boys cross country coach at Sunnyside High School, Jim Mielke’s Blue Devils won the 1975 state championship.
Or try to top this for a debut: In Mielke’s first season as Pima College’s men’s cross country coach, the Aztecs won the 1976 ACCAC championship and finished No. 2 at the NJCAA finals.
But Mielke might’ve topped both of those remarkable seasons in 1980 when Pima College spent most of the cross country season ranked No. 1 in the NJCAA.
“We had so much talent,’’ Mielke said then. “I think these kids taught me more than I taught them.’’
On a fall afternoon in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the Aztecs won the 1980 national championship and it wasn’t close. They scored 62 points (low score wins) to the 86 of runner-up Brevard Community College of Florida.
The Aztecs wore orange-themed uniforms designed by Mielke, a Tucson High School and UA graduate. As he stood near the finish line, waiting for the lead pack of runners to come into view, Mielke later told the Star: “Those little pumpkins came rolling over the hill. They came down the final hill like rockets.”
What was most impressive about PCC’s 1980 national champions is that all the runners were all from Arizona. Mielke didn’t recruit out-of-state athletes, as many of his colleagues in the ACCAC and NJCAA did.
Felipe Campoy of Marana High School was ninth overall.
Thomas Bush of Cholla High School finished 11th.
Manny Parra of Bisbee High School was 20th.
Pat Listo of Florence was 25th.
Ed Felix of tiny Sells Baboquivari was 30th of about 200 runners.
“The great thing is that these are all Arizona runners,’’ Mielke said that day in Idaho.
Mielke, who coached 21 NJCAA All-American distance runners at Pima before he retired in 2000, grew up on a ranch where the Tucson International Airport now sits. He wasn’t a standout athlete at Tucson High, but after helping to operate the UA’s vast intramurals program in the late 1950s, decided he wanted to be a coach and teacher for a career.
Good decision.
He was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame in 1992, and into the Sunnyside High School Hall of Fame in 2006. His career wasn’t limited to Sunnyside and Pima; Mielke was president of the NJCAA track and cross country coaches association. He helped to operate the Senior Olympics in Tucson and the Tucson Marathon. He spear-headed a movement to get the 1977 NJCAA Cross Country championships held at the Haven Golf Club in Green Valley.
Mielke began his coaching career with the iconic Vern Friedli on the Sunnyside Junior High School football team in 1961. He was soon elevated to the district’s high school staff where, with such standout distance runners as Raul Nido and Ralph Ortega, the Blue Devils became a state power, twice finishing No. 2 before winning the 1975 championship.
He left Sunnyside with a 50-0 dual meet winning streak intact.
He added to his legacy at Pima College.
“I get a kick out of going to small communities in Arizona and finding kids who don’t think they have a chance to go to college,’’ Mielke told the Star in 1999, after seven of his PCC teams had been ranked in the top 10. “Then I’ll bring them here because of their running skills.’’
Mielke’s first PCC cross country team, the national runner-up, was led by three Tucsonans: Larry Martinez, Art Menchaca and Frank Canez. It was quite an unexpected rise to prominence; when Mielke was hired in the infancy of the PCC athletic program, the cross country team had no equipment and no place to practice.
But it wasn’t long until the school’s “pumpkins’’ climbed the hill and became national champions.
