Before she was a coach, Ms. Elizabeth Ramirez was lacing up her own shoes to run at Armijo. “I am going into my second year of coaching at Armijo.” She serves as the Assistant Coach of the Cross-Country team. “Before helping coach the Armijo Cross Country and Track Distance teams, I had no prior coaching experience.” Instead, she works full time as a policy analyst for UC Davis.

“I graduated from AHS in 2014. My best memories came from my time on the cross-country team and the lifelong friendships that came out of it, so I was really excited to see a whole new generation of cross country kids and the little family they had created,” she said.

Following her time at Armijo, her career choices have been varied, but most of her paychecks have come from UC Davis. “I worked as a customer service representative for a veterinary genetics laboratory at UC Davis and, as an undergraduate student at UC Davis, I worked as a student supervisor for the Orientation department,” she said.

“I became a coach because I like helping out the youth in my community and I love running. Running has always been a big part of my life and it has been a tool that has helped me through a lot of tough moments in my life,” said Coach Ramirez. “I was excited to help foster that love for running in others while helping them grow and guiding them through the craziness that is high school and that weird transition period between being a kid and going into adulthood.”

Her first year as a coach was heavily influenced by the pandemic. “COVID was definitely tough for the team,” she said. “Our team had to be split up into two groups in order to comply with COVID guidelines, which made it hard for the kids to have the camaraderie that they would have during a normal season. It was also tough because we didn’t really know if they kids were going to get the chance to compete, but we tried to make the best out of it and, ultimately during COVID, my main goal became to create a safe space for the kids to come out and decompress and have a small semblance of “normal”.”

“Normal” can come in many forms. For Coach Ramirez, it comes in the form of a strong family with Armijo connections. “I come from a family of immigrants. I was born in Mexico and moved to California when I was very young. I have an older brother and sister who also graduated from AHS (2002 and 2005, respectively) and a younger sister that is currently a junior at AHS.”

“I’d love to see more diversity in staff and coaches. I am one of the few female coaches of color on campus and I think it would be really great to have more representation,” she said. If she could encourage people who were thinking of going into coaching, she would tell them to just do it. “It can be a little intimidating at first, but the reward you get from seeing how much positive change you can have in your athletes’ lives is so worth it,” she said.

When she’s not out on the track or training and strengthening runners, she enjoys painting and baking. “I also love reading during my down time. I obtained a large collection of books over quarantine that should hold me over for a while,” she said.