The Coach Who Built Two Dynasties
Coach Doug Soles has built two national powers in different states
Image Credit: RunnerSpace
How Doug Soles became the most decorated high school cross-country coach in American history — and then did it all over again
It started with a podcast.
In 2017, former Hoka professional running coach Ben Rosario sat down with two high school cross-country coaches on separate segments of his nationally recognized program. One coach — Doug Soles of Great Oak High School in California — spoke about the art of building powerhouse large-school programs. The other was me, Coach Weber, a small-school coach with a simple story to tell about developing distance runners with fewer resources but no less love for the sport.
We never met that day. We simply spoke into microphones, separated by miles and circumstances, united only by our devotion to cross-country and the young athletes who run it.
Eight years later, I had the privilege of interviewing Coach Soles for the first time — not as two voices on separate podcast segments, but in a personal phone conversation that would leave a lasting impression.
A Legacy Carved in California
By the time most people in the running world had heard of Doug Soles, he had already been quietly assembling one of the most remarkable dynasties in American high school sports history.
At Great Oak High School in Temecula, California — competing in the state's largest and most competitive classification — Soles built something that defied easy explanation. Fourteen California state championships. Eight for the girls. Six for the boys. A national championship at NXN, the sport's most prestigious team prize. More state titles in their division than any other school in California history.
The awards followed naturally. National Cross-Country Coach of the Year. Multiple California Coach of the Year honors. But those who know Soles well will tell you the trophies were never the point.
What Soles was really building, year after year, was something far harder to quantify: a culture. A belief system. A community where young men and women were taught that their God-given potential extended far beyond the finish line.
His mentor, Steve Chavez — himself shaped by the legendary Coach Joe Vigil — helped lay the philosophical foundation early in Soles's career. The lesson Soles took to heart was simple and enduring: develop the whole person, not just the athlete. Everything else — the championships, the records, the national recognition — would follow from that commitment.
And it did.
The Morning Everything Changed
When asked about his most cherished memory from his Great Oak years, Soles didn't hesitate.
It was 2010. Eleven years into his coaching career, after more than a decade of early mornings, long bus rides home in the dark, and the relentless work of believing in kids who were still learning to believe in themselves, his girls' team stood atop the podium at the California State Championships.
Even years later, his voice carries the unmistakable warmth of that moment. The excitement. The gratitude. The quiet disbelief that eleven years of work had crystallized into something so vivid and real.
What followed, of course, was a dynasty. Titles stacked upon titles. Records that may never be broken. A program that became a national standard for what high school cross-country could look like at its very best.
But on that November afternoon in 2010, none of that mattered yet. It was simply a group of coaches, parents, and teenagers — ordinary people — celebrating something they had worked extraordinarily hard to earn together.
That, more than any trophy, is what Doug Soles has always been chasing.
The Courage to Start Over
In 2021, Doug Soles did something that surprised even those who knew him best.
He left.
After decades of building one of California's most celebrated athletic programs, Soles packed up his family and relocated to Utah, trading the warmth of Southern California for the cold, expansive skies of the Wasatch Front. He settled near Herriman, a growing community southwest of Salt Lake City, and for a time, he simply stepped back from coaching altogether.
He focused on teaching. On reconnecting with family members who had put down roots in the area. On the quiet, unhurried work of learning a new place — its rhythms, its culture, its people.
Adapting to Utah's winters after years in Southern California was an adjustment in itself. But those who have watched Soles work understand that adaptation is among his greatest gifts. He doesn't resist new environments. He studies them, respects them, and finds within them the same raw material he has always worked with: young people hungry to become something greater than they currently are.
When he finally walked onto the practice fields at Herriman High School, he brought with him everything three decades of coaching had taught him. The culture-building instincts. The training philosophy. The quiet, unshakeable insistence that ordinary kids can do extraordinary things — if someone is willing to stand beside them long enough and refuse to stop believing.
His wife, Teresa — a runner herself, and one of the quiet pillars behind every program Soles has ever built — returned to help at practice for the first time in several years. Together, they set about doing what they had done before, in a new place, with new faces, starting entirely from scratch.
History, Repeated
What happened next is the kind of story that gets told at coaching clinics for generations.
In Soles's first full season at Herriman in 2022, his boys' team won the Woodbridge Invitational — one of the most brutally competitive high school cross-country invitationals in the nation — and finished third at NXN. The running world took notice, but many assumed it was an early surge, the kind that fades when reality sets in.
It didn't fade.
In 2023, Herriman won the NXN national championship outright. Doug Soles had become the first coach in the history of the sport to win NXN at two different schools — a feat so improbable that it may stand unchallenged for generations.
In 2024, his boys' program returned to the NXN podium, finishing third once again. The pattern was no longer surprising. It was simply what happened when Doug Soles was given time, trust, and a group of young people willing to work.
What made this run of success so extraordinary was not just the winning — it was the architecture behind it. Soles had not inherited a program in mid-dynasty, ripe with returning champions and established momentum. He had walked into a new school, in a new state, with a new community, and built everything from the ground up — methodically, patiently, and with the same quiet fire that had defined his work in California decades before.
The Man Behind the Medals
On January 4, 2025, I had the privilege of interviewing Doug Soles for the first time.
We had spent eight years connected by a podcast, by a shared sport, and by a mutual respect built entirely across distance. I had read his articles, studied his books, and watched his videos. I thought I had a good sense of who he was before we ever spoke directly.
I underestimated him.
Even over the phone, the energy was immediate. The passion was not performed — it was simply present, the way it is with people who have spent their lives doing exactly what they were meant to do. Soles spoke about his athletes the way a craftsman speaks about his finest work: with pride, yes, but more than that, with genuine love.
He was generous with his gratitude. He spoke warmly about his assistant coaches, the parents who gave their time and trust year after year, and the student-athletes who believed in a process they couldn't always see clearly from the inside. He credited his mentors without hesitation. He praised his wife with the kind of quiet sincerity that speaks louder than any formal acknowledgment.
And when he talked about Utah — about Herriman, about the community he and his staff had built from nothing — his voice carried that same enthusiasm it must have held in Temecula, all those years ago, when a group of teenage girls crossed a finish line and changed everything.
In his books How to Build a Championship Level Distance Runner and Becoming Varsity, Soles has documented the philosophy that underpins everything he does — the architecture of community, the science of progressive training loads, the discipline of goal-setting, and the art of building belief in young people who are still discovering the edges of their own potential. Both books are essential reading for any coach serious about building something that lasts.
But no book fully captures what it feels like to hear him speak about the kids he coaches.
The Rarest Kind of Coach
It is difficult to win one national championship. It requires talent and timing, culture and sacrifice, and an almost irrational belief — sustained over years, through setbacks and near-misses — that it is possible.
To win two, at different schools, in different states, with entirely different groups of young people, requires something else altogether. It requires a coach who has understood, at the deepest level, that the program was never really about the place.
It was always about the people.
The miles. The cold mornings. The long seasons. The conversations after practice that nobody sees. The belief, offered freely and without condition, that a teenager standing at the starting line has something extraordinary inside them — and that the job of the coach is simply to help them find it.
That is what Doug Soles has been doing for decades. That is what he is still doing, on the practice fields of Herriman, in the cold Utah air, with a new generation of runners who have yet to realize what they are capable of.
They will find out soon enough.
Their coach will make sure of it.
Coach Weber | Philippians 4:13
This article is scheduled for an update in June 2026.
The Herriman Boys Team won the national championship in in 2023.
Image Credit: MileSplit
Afterwords
Several NXN coaches have mentioned to Coach Soles that his books helped them improve and qualify for NXN. In his books below, he freely shares his specific workouts, goal-setting techniques, and how to build a successful running community and culture.
Becoming Varsity
How to Become a Championship Level Distance Runner: Soles, Doug: 9798335673525: Amazon.com: Books
Building Championship Cross-Country Programs
Building Championship Cross Country Programs: Soles, Doug: 9798372119963: Amazon.com: Books
About the Author
Coach Larry Weber is the author of Jesus on the Track: A Christian Athlete's Guide to Handling Hard Days, Building Mental Toughness, and Growing in Faith. A 2026 Washington State Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame inductee, Weber has built 13 state cross-country championship programs, coached USA Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers, and is the all-time record holder in the Original Ultimate Runner Competition (10 k, 400 meters, 100 meters, a mile and marathon all ran on the same day). He writes about faith, running, and formation at coachweber.org.
Jesus on the Track is available on Amazon.com on Kindle and paperback: Amazon.com: JESUS ON THE TRACK: A Christian Athlete's Guide to Handling Hard Days, Building Mental Toughness, and Growing in Faith eBook : Weber, Larry: Kindle Store
His next book, Mile Three: The Hardest Part Builds the Best Kids was just released on Kindle on May 5, 2026.
The paperbook version is scheduled for release on May 8, 2026.