With Planned Move of Nike Portland XC, The Course At Portland Meadows Is Likely Closed For Good

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Portland Meadows’ 14-year-run as a venue for high school cross country appears to be over.

In March, Willamette Week reported that the 2018-19 horse racing season would be the last at the track and the entire facility would soon be closing.

Last week, meet director Ken Martinez said the uncertainty of the availability of the site has caused him to move the Nike Portland XC meet in September to Blue Lake Park in nearby Fairview.

“Our relationship with Portland Meadows has been really wonderful. The people there are very accomodating,” Martinez said. “Because of the uncertainty, and it’s stressful to have to go find a site for a meet as big as ours, we had to be proactive.”

Portland Meadows, of course, was best known in high school cross country circles as the home of Nike Cross Nationals from 2004-13. Sometimes the best runners and teams in the U.S. slogged through a quagmire there. Other times it was merely cool and damp, which is to be expected in the Northwest in December.

Coaches, parents, athletes and spectators seemed to either love it – or hate it.

NXN, perhaps partly in order to get away from the annual potential for a heavy dose of mud, moved to the fir-sheltered Glendoveer Golf Course in 2014.

Portland Meadows opened as a horse-racing track in the late 1940s and enjoyed big crowds through the 1970s. 

In 2004, human racing arrived with the first Nike Team Nationals, the first national championship for a high school team sport. Saratoga Springs NY won the girls team title that year with a rock-star lineup fronted by Nicole Blood.

Legendary Hall of Fame coach Joe Newton and his York Dukes from Elmhurst, Ill. won the first boys title. 

“Forever it will be one of my favorite cross country courses,” said Eric Dettman, who was a member of the 2004 and 2005 York teams and now is the head track and cross country coach at Portland’s Lincoln High.

“Even when I walk in (with my team) for Nike Portland XC, you get that rush-back of adrenaline. I know what we did there and I know what that place stands for.”

Fayetteville-Manlius NY, under coach Bill Aris, built a legacy at Portland Meadows with seven national championships in a row from 2006-12.

High school legends Chris Derrick and Lukas Verzbicas and Edward Cheserek raced and won there.

The 2013 girls race featured one of the greatest high school races of all-time, with Alexa Efraimson and Elise Cranny taking on two-time champion Sarah Baxter.

“Honestly, I wish (nationals) was still there,” Dettman said. “Glendoveer Golf Course is great, but there’s a different aura about Portland Meadows. There’s that giant grandstand, so it’s way more spectator-friendly. At Glendoveer, there’s a quarter of the race you can’t even see.”

Martinez, who coaches at Aloha High in Beaverton has overseen the school’s annual cross country meet for 27 years, has seen names change and course changes before.

But the run at Portland Meadows, sponsored by Nike, as Nike Pre-Nationals and Nike Portland XC, is officially over. The September meet, one of the largest on the West Coast, drew 6,000 runners in 2017 and 5,500 in 2018.

And in late summer, when the weather is nice, Portland Meadows is an ideal cross country venue. There are acres of parking. It’s close to the freeway. And from a central location in the middle of the infield, spectators can watch nearly the entire race unfold.

“It does feel like the end of an era,” Martinez said. “The whoop-de-doo hills, the hay bales. When it gets close to NXN time, RunnerSpace will do a throwback post to some of the runners who ran there who have gone on to professional careers, or show something with a lot of mud.”

In addition to the long history of the place as a horse racing track – it was the first track in the country to have night racing under the lights – there were also live concerts there, primarily in the 1990s.

Nirvana played there at the height of its powers, in 1992. The Grateful Dead and Metallica did shows there. And Eminem performed, with the Warped Tour, in 1999.

For the purposes of high school running, Portland Meadows will go into history as a proving ground for a decades' worth of the nation's best cross country athletes.

“From a course standpoint, I’ll always remember how unique it was,” Dettman said. “It was way different than anything I had ever experienced. It will always have a special place in my heart.”

But times change. 

Nike Portland XC will continue on, at a new location, just like NXN did.

"This meet constantly changes, names and venues, and keeps going," Martinez xaid. "I've been doing it for 27 years. I'm used to it. I'm hoping teams understand it's the same meet (at Blue Lake Park) and has the same vibe as the past in the new location."