The night after Ella Donaghu finished second place at the Nike Cross Nationals cross country race on Dec. 5, she sat down with her family for movie night.
Her muscles were still sore from covering the muddy, 5-kilometer trail at Glendoveer Golf Course in 17 minutes, 10.2 seconds – against 196 other competitors from across the country.
Three weeks earlier, Donaghu, a 17-year-old senior who’s headed to Stanford University next fall, captured third place in the Nike Northwest Cross Regional meet in Boise. Two weeks before that, she opened the OSAA girls 6A cross country state meet with a blistering pace and never looked back. She won the 5-kilometer race in a record time of 17:26. It was her third state meet victory in a row.
Arguably one of the most dominating female high school runner in Oregon history, all the accomplishments that she’d earned and the finality of the fall season hit Donaghu as she sat down to watch “Elf” that night with her parents and younger sister, Ruby.
Leading up to the national competition on Dec. 5, she thought a lot about how to prepare herself. “I mean obviously I put pressure on myself, but I think it was a good pressure,” she says. “It was more of a like: ‘Hey, you’ve come so far from when you were a freshman to now. You’ve developed so much and had so much fun, so just go out there and have fun with it, and do what you know you can do.’”
When she crossed the finish line about 13 seconds behind Colorado senior Katie Rainsberger, Donaghu sealed her position in the upper echelon of Grant sports history.
Grant head cross-country coach Doug Winn was ecstatic about Donaghu’s performance and about her season. He called her a special runner, a great team leader and someone who never lets success go to her head.
“She’s so herself and so authentic,” Winn says. “Whereas people in her position with such a high level as an athlete would start to go, ‘Oh, I’m pretty good,’ be sort of superior, and there is not a speck of that with Ella. She’s just Ella. And I love her the way she is.”
Her father and Grant assistant coach, Michael Donaghu, recognizes the dedication she puts into the sport. “I’m really just proud of her,” he says. “It’s hard to pull it all together. She definitely would be a person that would have a chance to win if everything went right, and to get second, you know it’s not beyond what I thought she was capable of.”
Donaghu looks back fondly on her high school cross-country career and the endless list of individual accomplishments. But she says her top highlight comes from freshman year when the Grant girls won the 2012 state meet.
“Looking back, it makes you realize how hard it is to win a team state championship in Oregon and…I really had a lot of respect for what our team did that year,” she says.
Her teammates say her athletic talent isn’t the only thing that makes her a great leader. “She was welcoming right away,” says Mahala Lahvis, a junior who was new to the team this year. “The fact that she can…have such a good personality, be so fast, be so smart…being a good runner isn’t the only good aspect about her. ”
Looking ahead, Donaghu is excited to continue her running career at Stanford, where she looks forward to not having the pressure of being at the top. “I’m going to be training with people that are a lot better than me,” she says. “So that’s just only going to make me better, so I’m really looking forward to that.”
As for the team that she’s leaving behind, Donaghu says she’ll miss her high school. “Cross country is a team sport and I think the memories that I have with the team are way cooler than any I’ve ever created (by myself),” she says.
Her involvement with Grant running isn’t completely over yet, as the track and field season is quickly approaching. Donaghu holds the fastest high school girls’ time in the 3000-meter run in Oregon history. This year her main goal is to stay thankful for her past four seasons.
“It will be sad to leave,” she says. “I think it’s bittersweet, you know. It’s the end of one really cool thing, but it’s also the start of another.” ◊
