It’s hard to imagine now, but former All-Pro offensive tackle Jon Runyan spent his first two falls at Carman-Ainsworth High School running cross country.
“He probably ran in the high 18s, and he’s huge,” long-time Carman-Ainsworth cross country coach Kenn Domerese said.
It’s even harder to imagine that the reason he ran with the skinny kids was because his mother was concerned that Runyan, the biggest and most talented athlete in school, would get hurt playing football.
Getting Runyan onto the gridiron was a tough sell. It wasn’t until his junior year that his mother finally relented, persuaded that football could be Runyan’s meal ticket.
“Most of the lobbying was done by Tim Johns, because he lived not far from me,” Runyan said. “He’d stop by every day on his way home after work. He saw me playing basketball in the driveway and kept lobbying.
“It became a point where I haven’t technically grown height-wise since I was 16 years old. The skill set I had as a five in basketball wasn’t going to transfer very well to Division I basketball, me being 6-8. I had to find another pathway. I did, and it worked out, I guess.”
Before Runyan became a football star, he established his name on the basketball court and in the throwing circle during track and field season.
In basketball, Runyan was called up to the varsity early in his freshman season. He spearheaded the birth of one of the Flint area’s top programs, as Carman-Ainsworth went 20-0 during the 1991-92 season before losing in the first game of the districts to powerful Flint Northwestern, 57-47.
“We won a couple of Big Nine championships, that’s about it,” Runyan said. “The year we had a really good team it was us, Northern and Northwestern all ranked in the top seven in the state playing in the same district. That was the best team, and we couldn’t handle Northwestern that one year.”
Runyan’s greatest success as a high school athlete was in track and field. He was the state Class A shot put champion in 1991 and 1992. He was sixth in the discus in 1990 and second in 1992. His discus throw of 178 feet, 1 inch in 1992 would’ve won the state meet more often than not, but he was beaten by Grandville’s Brett Organek, whose throw of 196-5 was a state-meet record at the time.
Runyan credits his time with Carman-Ainsworth throws coach Mike Stuart for helping him learn how to train, something that served him well as he moved into his football career.
“He taught me how to lift weights,” Runyan said. “We didn’t have big weight programs on the football team or with the basketball team. Mike made sure you had access to doing Olympic lifts, squats, power cleans, clean-and-jerks, explosive types of lifts you wouldn’t get exposed to a lot because a lot of people didn’t know how to do it. When you look at groundbased, explosive type stuff, that’s what generates into all athletic movements. People thought he taught me how to throw; he taught me how to lift.”
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