CASTRO VALLEY LEGEND TAKES THE REINS

CASTRO VALLEY LEGEND TAKES THE REINS
Chabot College has a new cross country and track and field coach, but Dooney Jones is no newcomer to coaching and mentoring young athletes.
Far from it.
Jones is an inductee in the Castro Valley Sports Hall of Fame for his success as Castro Valley's track and field coach. He has about 35 years coaching experience at the high-school level. He also has sent a lot of kids to college as a USA Track and Field coach and mentors college coaches across the country, he says.
His specialty is the long jump and triple jump.
His 2014 Trojan team won the CIF North Coast Section Meet of Champions team title and finished No. 2 in the state. It all started when starred as a sprinter and long jumper at Mt. Eden, where he started his coaching career around 1986.
He also coached four years at Logan.
In 2007, after taking two years off, he started coaching the triple jump at Castro Valley under Pete Brewer. In 2008, Jones began a storied run as Trojans head coach until this year. 
He inherits a Gladiator program long headed by successful head coach Kyle Robinson, who stepped down after the 2023-24 season. Robinson enjoyed a special finale campaign: the Glads men's cross country team won its first Coast Conference title in the fall, then his men's track team placed seventh in the state.
Jones' Chabot cross country teams are in a rebuilding mode, with five competitors on the men's team and just one on the women's team. Some are redshirting.
Jones, a Discovery Bay resident, said he and Robinson were talking over the summer about the coaching change.
"He was telling me he was gonna step down and he thought it would be a perfect situation for me," Jones said.
Returner Dylan Baptista, out of Liberty High School, is "really good," Jones said. "He's a good kid; he's a very good runner. I've got a lot of high hopes for him."
Baptista finished a solid ninth at a recent Monterey meet. Kai Emerson was 24th. Ariel Encarnacion was 34th.
Baptista, who placed fifth in the conference last year, is a running machine who puts in seven miles in the morning and will match that in the evening, the coach shared in admiration.
Medha Gowda, out of Dublin High, who finished 12th in the state in the 1500 at Chabot in track, tops the women's team.
"She's a very good runner," Jones said.