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20 years ago: Mead’s cross country nirvana
By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor
Pat Tyson thinks back on the team he coached 20 years ago at Mead High School in Spokane and sometimes it feels seems like it happened last week.
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So vivid were the characters on the 1993 Mead cross country team — and so dominant — that the Panthers are on a short list of the greatest of all-time.
This was the peak year for a Mead program that ran roughshod through the decade of the 1990s in Washington, winning nine straight state championships (and 12 total under Tyson).
The 1993 team was second in a row to be ranked No. 1 by Marc Bloom’s Harrier Magazine.
It was the team that went 1-2-3 at the Washington state cross country meet. It was the team that set the Woodbridge course record in California that lasted for 17 years, until Arcadia broke it in 2010.
And it was the team that put two runners — brothers Matthew, a senior, and Micah Davis, a junior — in the Top 10 at Foot Locker Nationals.
“When that team was running together it was a beautiful thing to watch,” said Tyson, now the men’s cross country and track coach at Gonzaga University. “Perfect arm motions, perfect strides, they looked collegiate. They just had it.”
Mead — and it’s centerpiece, in particular, Matthew Davis — have come to stand for a particular time period. In the early 1990s, the grunge rock blasting out of amplifiers in Seattle was heard loud and clear across the state in Spokane. Think mosh pits and flannel shirts, and a boys cross country team swept up in its own collective desire do something great as a “band.”
Davis was not a prototypical runner. He was muscled and barrel-chested, an update of the Steve Prefontaine mold. And his coach, Tyson, preached the lessons he learned from his 1960s idols, Gerry Lindgren and Rick Riley, and Pre, his former college roommate in Eugene.
Davis fit in with the skateboarding and grunge crowd. A star at cross country meets, he was approachable and unassuming out of his blue-and-gold singlet. In the halls of school, he often wore headphones plugged into a Walkman that spun the cassette tapes of obscure, full-throttle alternative bands.
As a runner, he set himself apart with three Washington cross country titles and a three-mile best of 14:09 as a senior in 1993 at Sun Willows Golf Course. He ran with the same wild abandon as the…
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