GRIFFITH PARK — The Hollywood High cross-country team arrived at the park at 6:15 Saturday morning, an hour and forty-five minutes before its first race, because that is when it arrives everywhere now.
“July did that,” said Ines Valadez, in her ninth season as coach. “We moved to six a.m. for the heat, like everyone did. Then the heat broke and I said we could go back to four in the afternoon, and twenty-three teenagers told me no. I have never in my life been told no by twenty-three teenagers at once.”
Twenty-three is the other number. Ms. Valadez has coached rosters of nine, eleven and, in a good year, fourteen. This fall’s team is the largest the program has fielded in the years anyone in the athletic office can find records for, swollen by a handful of soccer players whose club season moved, two transfers, and — by her own count — six students who “saw the six a.m. group running the stairs on Whitley all summer and wanted to know what was wrong with them.”
The season opened on the park’s dirt course, a five-school meet on the three-mile loop that begins on the flat and does not stay there. The girls finished third of five; the boys were second, behind a Valley school that Ms. Valadez said “does this to everybody in September and then we’ll see.”
Mackenzie Oduya, a senior in her fourth season, ran 19:52 for the three miles, fourth overall and forty seconds better than her opener a year ago. She attributed the improvement to the hill, which she has run at dawn most days since July, and to a change in temperament.
“Last year I ran scared of the hill,” she said. “This summer I ran the hill so many times it got boring. You cannot be scared of something boring.”
Elias Stroud, a junior, led the boys in 16:40, seventh overall, in what Ms. Valadez called the first race he has run “from the front instead of from behind everybody, wondering.” He went out with the leaders on the flat, lost contact on the climb, and made up two places on the descent.
“The descent is where people give the race away,” Stroud said. “They’re tired and they brake. I decided in about June that I wasn’t going to brake.”
The roster’s size has produced a practical problem the program has never had: not enough of anything. The team has borrowed a second van from the softball program for meets, is short seven pairs of the racing flats it lends to runners who cannot afford them, and has been running its dawn workouts in two groups because the stairway on Whitley Heights, which the team has used as its hill for years, is not wide enough for twenty-three.
“The neighbors on the stairs have been very patient,” Ms. Valadez said. “I have started bringing a box of doughnuts up on Fridays. It is the least I can do, and it is also, currently, the most I can do.”
The team’s next races are the league meets, which begin in October, and the City Section meet in November, which the girls have qualified for in three of the last four years and the boys in one. Ms. Valadez said she would like to talk about November in November.
“It’s September. I have twenty-three kids who like getting up at six,” she said. “I’m not going to jinx that by planning.”
Oduya, asked whether the team would move practice back to the afternoon once the mornings turn cold in November, looked at her coach, and her coach looked at the ground.
“No,” Oduya said. “We took a vote.”