Jeffery Mendonca '25 Recruiting Profile

Hello my name is Jeffery R. Mendonca Jr.

I am a distance runner at Hilmar High School in the Central Valley in California . I’m a straight A student and have received the superintendents honor roll every year. I’m involved in FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) and HCA (Hilmar Christian Athletes) at my high school and I’m extremely outgoing. I‘ll tell you a story about how I started running and how I came to love the sport. I started my running career my freshman year with no running experience at all. In Hilmar there is a big football program with numerous family donating money to build the program each year. Everyone that attends Hilmar almost 100% plays football. It’s almost like Sparta in ancient Greece. Through out my elementary and middle school years I always had the idea of someday I‘m going to play football, but I never really thought much about it. Towards the end of my 7th grade year was when the pandemic started and that would change my relationships forever. As I lived far away from Hilmar all of my other friends still lived around each other and started hanging out more and more. As they became better friends they started becoming more distant from me. Once school started up again in the midst of 8th grade they wouldn’t want to hang out with me anymore. They would make fun of me and some of the others in that group. This chain of events caused me to not want to play football anymore. I also wasn’t much of an aggressive kid either influencing me to not join too. Once high school came around I felt pretty bored and didn’t really know what to do. One morning I heard on the announcements that there was Cross Country signs ups. All I knew about Cross country was from the Movie McFarland USA, and I was focused on baseball in the spring I figured “I can try this out since track is during spring”. I always thought of myself being a fast kid as I would get first in the mile during PE. After I signed up, I walked to the school pool since the cross country coach is also the swim coach. At the time I had no idea. So when I walk in the pool I saw a bunch of kids swimming and they stared at me wondering if I was lost or a new member that they have never seen before. The coachs mom (the owner of the pool, which ironically was my old swimming teacher) greeted me and told me to change into some swimming shorts. I remeber it like it was yesterday, me standing on top of the diving board asking someone ”Are you sure this is cross country“ and they assured me I was in the right place. And when I jumped into the pool that would be the best decision I have ever made. Running started out pretty rough as usual of having no conditioning but towards the end of the season I had gained the 1st place spot on the team and a ton of new friends. As it started to come around baseball time I tried out for 2 weeks and the coach told me I wouldn‘t get much playing time. So I figured why not just do track where I can dominate, and I did just that. That summer after track I realized I can be the best runner this school has ever seen. That summer I build a running schedule and followed it day in and day out. This resulted me in having an amazing sophomore year breaking both sophmore and Junior records. This would catapult my confidence and having the drive to become one of the best in my section. I was committed and I started recruiting runners as well really modeling my team together and because of these efforts I helped me and my team breaking team school records barely missing state. The combination of beautiful scenery and the friends I made, have made me fall in love with this sport. As I‘m going to become a senior next year I’ve learned a lot from cross country and track from better health to social skills. From my experience in the past 3 years I would love to continue running at a higher level where I can meet new people that love this sport as much as I do. Thank you making it this far and thank you for giving me this opportunity.