When Kevin Wright looked around the Hotel Murano in Tacoma during the Washington State Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame ceremony on Jan. 23, he felt a rush of nervousness and a brief sense of self-doubt before his induction into the eternally esteemed group of coaches.
“I was very nervous getting an honor like that, and then being in a room with other Hall of Famers and other great coaches, it’s just like, ‘Do I really deserve this?’” Wright said.
One could ask anyone in the Capital High School community that question, and the answer would be a resounding yes.
Wright brought a level of consistency to the Capital cross country program that other schools could only dream of. In his 27 years as a coach, including 20 as the girls head coach, the team qualified for 15 straight state championship meets, including placing third in both 2012 and 2013 and 10th in 2014.
Wright’s coaching career had been wrapped up for eight years by the time he received a call in late October that he had been selected for the Washington State Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame’s 2026 class. Wright, now in his second year as the athletic director at Lakes High School in Lakewood, was sitting on the bench at a girls soccer game when he got the call. He knew he had been nominated but wasn’t aware he was in the process of being selected.
“I cried a little out of excitement. The girls were like, ‘Are you OK?’ I told them this was a good thing,” Wright said. “At this point in time, I didn’t think it would happen because it’s been eight years since I coached cross country. Normally, if it’s going to happen, it happens within a couple of years. I thought that opportunity passed by.”
Wright was inducted alongside Pope John Paul II coach Larry Weber and former Mead coach Steve Kiesel, who both coached state-championship teams and runners. While Wright didn’t win state titles during his tenure, his success was rooted in remarkable consistency and growth.
“It means somebody noticed all of the hard work that I’ve done over those 27 years at Capital. It didn’t go unnoticed,” Wright said of his induction into the Hall of Fame. “I didn’t have all the state championships like the other guys that got in. Still, that success of our program over those years was a different kind of success. That kind of success isn’t always recognized. When I took over, we had 15 girls on the girls team, and by the time I left, we were averaging over 40. There was one year where we had more girls on the Capital team than there was on all of the other girls teams in our league combined.”
Born in Nampa, Idaho, Wright first played football in sixth grade in Pendleton, Oregon, impressing his coaches with his speed in training before trying out for cross country in middle school in Milwaukie. According to Wright, “I was a little, itty bitty, dinky guy, and I was small.”
He joined the cross country team at Rex Putnam High School in Milwaukie and qualified for the state meet multiple times. By the end of his senior season, Wright thought his cross country career was finished.
His brother convinced him to join the track and field team at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, and while he enjoyed competing in track as a distance runner, Wright’s true passion for cross country lingered as the school didn’t sponsor a cross country program at the time.
Wright transferred to Western Oregon University in Monmouth, which had a strong cross country program, and he qualified for the NAIA National Championships twice in 1988 and 1989 — once as an individual and once with the team. He once held the school record in the 10,000 meters.
“Matter of fact, I’m still on the top 10 list at Western Oregon for the 10K,” Wright said. “I think I’m down to number eight, but I’m still on there.”
At Western Oregon, Wright competed for coach Debbie Eide, a member of the 1983 U.S. world championships marathon team. He first picked up the coaching itch after learning from a world-class athlete.
“I really started finding an interest in that by the way she was coaching us, not only with what she was giving us but how she described it,” Wright said.
Wright became a volunteer coach with the Capital High School cross country program in the fall of 1991 and was hired on as an assistant the following year, while also starting to coach track in 1992. He eventually became the girls cross country head coach in 1999, while fellow Hall of Famer Jerry Miller coached the boys. For the first few years at Capital, the turnout for the girls team fluctuated but never rose above 15 student athletes.
But the standard was established in 2000. A year prior, Capital narrowly missed out on a trip to the state meet, but the Cougars punched their ticket to state for the first time in 2000.
Wright said traveling east for state every November didn’t become an annual expectation until about 2005 or 2006.
“It was a big relief, a little bit of a surprise to us,” Wright said of the 2000 state trip. “We finished 15th out of 16 that year. Four or five years later, this is what we expected. We’re going to state. We work hard. Because we work hard, we’re going to get to state.”
No year was more meaningful to Wright in his career than the fall of 2007, when he, along with his wife Danelle who served as a volunteer, coached their daughters Amanda and Brianne. Amanda was a senior that year, and Brianne was a freshman. The Cougars won the district title that season, a memory bolted on the walls of Kevin’s Lakes High School office. The photo shows the whole team huddled together, with Amanda holding the trophy at the top of the podium and Brianne standing behind Kevin to the right. Kevin coached both of his daughters for all four years of their prep careers, but 2007 was the only year they competed together.
“That’s probably my greatest memory,” Wright said.
Wright thanked his daughters for helping to establish a focus on leadership development in the Capital cross country program, but their leadership was deployed in different ways.
“My younger daughter Brianne was just an amazing leader. The kids looked up to her. A lot of the leadership stuff that we did with our team, we developed around Brianne’s attitude,” he said. “Amanda was a leader in a different way. She was our top runner. She was on the state podium. She was the team mom. She always had bags of sweats for all the kids. Her bag always weighed like 50 pounds because she had enough warm gear for all the kids who forgot stuff.”
By the time his youngest daughter Brianne graduated in 2011, Capital had qualified for state 11 years in a row, and that streak continued through 2015.
Wright also played a role in the inception of the Capital Invitational, an early-season meet designed to provide runners of all abilities a welcoming and competitive start to the season. He oversaw the Capital Lakefair Run, assisted annually with the Capital City Marathon, and served on the organizing committee for the Westside Classic District Cross Country meet.
Wright left Capital in 2018 to transition into becoming an athletic director, but his 27 years there will forever be cemented into the Washington State Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame. While he also found success coaching track and field in high jump, relay and distance events, cross country will forever be his true love, as Wright calls it “the ultimate team sport.”
His philosophy as a coach was that the team is “as good as our weakest link” and “everybody matters.” In cross country, Wright said, a runner can place first at the meet, but if the others don’t score points, the team won’t succeed.
“I always talk to kids about how it’s the ultimate team sport and you have to support your teammates,” he said. “One through seven have to run well because sometimes if we don’t have the super fast 1-2-3, we need 5-6-7 to beat their 5-6-7 so that we can score well. Everybody had to have a good day for you to be super successful.”
In his Hall of Fame speech, Wright thanked his coaches and his family while describing the importance of showing up for student athletes.
Now, as an athletic director, Wright aims to continue showing up for both athletes and coaches at Lakes, just as he did in his legendary career at Capital. While winning certainly helps, medals and trophies aren’t the end-all-be-all to a Hall of Fame resumé. For Wright, a Hall of Fame resumé is about the impact a coach can make on a student athlete not just in sports but in life.
“With my coaches, I try to talk to them about the same things that were important to me. What are you doing to develop leaders?” he said. “All kids have leadership capability, but it’s just about where they are going to lead. Are they going to lead in the direction that’s going to help you build your program? How are you having those kids learn in your program what it takes to be successful and trying to teach those life lessons? One of the things that I had in my speech was about showing up for people. Where can I show up for you as a basketball coach, or a soccer coach, or a football coach, or a wrestler, or a cross country runner, or a baseball player?
“I love winning, but winning is not everything,” Wright added. “To me, it’s not the most important thing, but if you do the things right, you’re going to win when the time comes.”
