Josh Evans: 'How good can he get?'

MARION -- Josh Evans played football in seventh grade.

As a lineman.

"That doesn't make much sense, does it?" he said.

Not when you consider that it's three years later, and Evans still doesn't exceed triple digits on the scale by a lot.

Josh Evans was born to be a runner, built to be a runner. He's an extraordinary one; arguably the best in Iowa.

A sophomore at Linn-Mar High School, Evans is the top-ranked boy in Class 4A, according to the Iowa Association of Track Coaches rankings.

Evans vaulted to No. 1 after outrunning Ben Anderson of West Des Moines Valley and Cole Decker of West Des Moines Dowling at the Heartland Classic on Sept. 17 at Ames.

"That definitely makes me happy, knowing I can run with the best guys and that they shouldn't be able to run away from me," he said.

Rare is the runner that can run at "even splits," maintaining the same pace for 5,000 meters.

Evans can do it.

"His whole engine turns over so much better than just about everybody else," said Todd Goodell, the coach for the Linn-Mar boys' and girls' cross country teams. "Good college runners can run even splits, but most high-schoolers go out hard that first mile, then slow down 10, 20, 30 seconds."

Evans set the school record with his 15:34 clocking at the Linn-Mar Invitational meet Tuesday at Tuma Soccer Complex. That's an average pace of  5:01 per mile.

After his brief foray into football, Evans went out for track the spring of his seventh-grade year.

"I was OK, but a couple of my teammates consistently beat me," he said.

He joined the Cedar Rapids Track Club that next summer, and his running took off. He has had to battle some injuries along the way -- an Achilles heel in the summer of 2009, then a stress fracture in the summer of 2010.

"It's a good thing I have coaches that tell me to slow down," Evans said. "Otherwise, I would probably run myself into the ground to go harder and faster."

Evans was home-schooled through ninth grade before becoming a full-time student at Linn-Mar this school year.

"I was excited to hanging out with my friends and getting prepared for college," he said, reporting that he was getting all A's so far.

Not in Evans' lifetime has a Metro contestant won an individual state cross country title.

Jesse Sand of Cedar Rapids Regis was the last to do it, taking the Class 2A title in 1994. And to find the last big-school winner, you have to go back to 1958, when Ralph Trimble of Cedar Rapids Jefferson ran to the Class AAA title.

That's what Evans is chasing.

"He's eyeing it," Goodell said. "He doesn't appear to be overly mature physically yet, so it's going to be interesting -- how good can he get?"

 Evans wins at the Cedar Rapids Prairie Invitational earlier this season: