Nuñez returns to the sport he wasn’t yet ready to leave

Retirement was supposed to mean finding other things to do. There was travel and time for things that had been pushed aside during decades of practices, meets and seasons that rolled almost immediately into the next one.

But somehow there were still races to find. He looked on television, on streaming platforms. He checked out high school meets and went to college competitions. It didn't particularly matter who was running. David Nuñez just wanted to be there.

“I thought I could do without it, but I couldn't,” Nuñez said. “I thought I could step away, but I just missed it so much.”

So, a year after stepping away from a coaching career that stretched across 35 years, Nuñez is back as the head cross country coach at Organ Mountain High School.

It wasn't supposed to work out this way. When Nuñez retired in 2025, there was little reason to think the departure would be temporary. He had spent nearly his entire professional career at the school, beginning when it was Oñate High School. He started as a student teacher during the 1989-90 school year, began coaching there in 1990 and took over the boys and girls cross country programs in 1994.

By 2023, the school credited him with 30 district cross country championships — 17 boys and 13 girls. He was named the Class 5A boys cross country coach of the year in 2021 and girls cross country coach of the year in 2023.

Then, in April 2025, Organ Mountain named its track for him. It looked very much like the closing chapter of a coaching career, and Nuñez attempted to treat it that way.

“I tried traveling,” he said. “I mean, I was all over up and down the East Coast. I tried doing things that I've never done before, but it never gave that same type of enjoyment as coaching did.”

Before long, he was talking his wife into trips to El Paso to watch track meets, sometimes promising a good dinner afterward. At some of them, he didn't know a single athlete.

“She’s a trooper,” Nuñez said. “She’s been married to a coach a long time.”

Maybe the coach should have known that walking away wouldn't be quite so simple. Running had been finding its way into his life since middle school in Alamogordo, when something as ordinary as the Presidential Physical Fitness Test changed its direction. Nuñez ran the 600 and a coach named Ray McDowell noticed.

“He said, ‘Hey, you really ran that 600 well. Why don't you come out for our track team?’” Nuñez remembered. “So I went out for track and the bug hasn't left, man.”

He later ran for Bob and Marilyn Sepulveda, coaches whose lessons remained with him long after the races themselves were forgotten. Bob coached him in track and Marilyn in cross country. Nuñez remembers them as ahead of their time in developing runners.

“A lot of what Bob and Marilyn did I still use as part of my coaching scheme, my coaching philosophy,” he said.

Running eventually took him to the University of Northern Colorado, where he competed for coach Ed Brandt. It also took a kid from Alamogordo to places he had never imagined seeing. On a team bus trip to a meet in Laramie, Wyoming, Nuñez spotted a large bird running across the road.

“Wow, did you see the size of that roadrunner?” he said.

The bus went silent. His coach turned around and wanted to know who had said that.

One of Nuñez's teammates supplied the answer: “The athlete you recruited from New Mexico.”

It wasn't a roadrunner. It was a pheasant.

“I had never seen a real-life pheasant in my life,” Nuñez said. “I never got outside of Alamogordo, so I was thinking it was an overgrown roadrunner.”

On another trip through the Dakotas, his coach learned Nuñez had never seen Mount Rushmore and detoured the team bus so he could. Running became more than a sport. It brought Nuñez experiences, relationships and mentors that eventually shaped what he wanted to give his own athletes.

Teaching was almost inevitable. Nuñez calls education the family business. His father spent 52 years in education. His sister was an English teacher. An aunt served as a teacher, principal and superintendent. His wife teaches. His son teaches.

Nuñez became a social studies teacher, teaching courses ranging from economics and legal systems to AP U.S. history and politics. To him, the two parts of his professional life were never particularly different.

“The field is an extension of the classroom,” he said. “Coaching is teaching. There's no getting around it.”

And much of what Nuñez teaches has little to do with how fast someone can cover five kilometers. Set goals. Work hard. Pay attention to details. Don't make excuses. And learn how to fail.

“Fail well,” Nuñez calls it.

It was a lesson he first had to learn himself.

“I was the typical runner that really beat myself up over a bad race,” he said.

Eventually, Nuñez learned that a poor performance didn't have to become a judgment about the athlete who produced it.

“Don't tell me what I did wrong,” he said. “Tell me what I need to do right.”

Failing well, he said, means learning from failure, growing from it and refusing to use it to beat yourself up. Marilyn Sepulveda had a more colorful way of dismissing excuses.

“If a frog didn't have legs, he would always land on his butt,” she would tell him.

The message was simple: Stop explaining what happened and start looking for solutions. At the college level came another lesson Nuñez carried into coaching: “Competition is the goal and camaraderie is the fuel.”

Over the decades, lessons borrowed from coaches who influenced him mixed with lessons Nuñez learned himself. They became his philosophy.

“This isn't just a sport about running,” he said. “We don't want to just develop runners. We want to develop people.”

That becomes especially apparent when Nuñez talks about the different athletes who show up for high school cross country. There are runners capable of competing with the best in the state. There are also freshmen who arrive with little experience and may simply be looking for a sport. Every one of them, Nuñez believes, has something to offer.

“I really don't like these words, ‘bad runner,’” he said. “Hasn't developed yet.”

Nuñez individualizes training where possible and groups runners according to their developmental level. As they improve, they move up. There are no shortcuts.

“Rome wasn't built in a night, and neither are distance runners,” Nuñez tells them.

That philosophy extends to how hard he pushes them. He would rather discover that a runner could have handled more than find out afterward that he demanded too much.

“I can always add, but I can't take back,” he said.

Ultimately, Nuñez wants his runners to leave with more than faster times. He wants them to know how to set goals, work toward them, deal with failure, become disciplined and understand that seemingly insignificant details sometimes make the difference.

“The little things matter,” Nuñez said. “The little things are big when it matters.”

For 35 years, Nuñez had a place to teach those lessons. Then he retired.

Even away from Organ Mountain, though, the sport kept pulling him back. New Mexico State cross country coach Joseph Rath, a longtime friend, invited Nuñez to speak to his team before last season. Nuñez went. And when the opportunity eventually came to return to coach the Knights, there wasn't much of a decision to make.

“I didn't hesitate,” Nuñez said. “Did not hesitate. I was like, ‘I'm there. Where do I sign?’”

There is a saying among coaches, Nuñez said, that eventually you know.

“You'll know when your time is up,” he said. “You'll know. And hopefully you get to choose that time. Sometimes you don't get to. But you'll know when it's time to say goodbye.”

Nuñez thought he knew, but a year away convinced him otherwise. Perhaps there is something fitting about that for a coach who has spent decades teaching runners not to treat a disappointing result as a final judgment.

Learn from it. Adjust. Figure out what comes next. Fail well. Retirement taught Nuñez something, too.

“I don't think that I was ready,” he said. “I don't think I was ready to say goodbye to this great sport.”

Someday, he knows, he will be. Just not yet.