Even with a quick glance around the indoor track facilities at Bates College during practice, it’s apparent that Taka Ranucci has some big — and very fast — shoes to fill.

“It’s a lot of pressure, to live up to the names that have come before me here at EL,” Ranucci said. “That’s for sure.”

Ranucci is a sprinter. Like Buddy Foss before him, and Colby Brooks before that. And the further into the track and field history at Edward Little you look, the more the names in the sprinting events jump off the page.

“We’ve always been fortunate to have the athlete or athletes,” EL coach Ryan Laroche said. “Granted you have kids like Colby Brooks who come around once every decade, but we’ve also been lucky. You get kids sometimes who just have that quickness that a coach recognizes, and thinks, ‘Hey, we need to make this kid into a sprinter.’ You also get your kids who come in and are just hard workers. No one would have expected, for instance, Branden Gruver, when he was a freshman, to end up being a multi-event scorer for us last year as a senior, but as a hard-worker, he turned into one of those kids.”

Across the gym, two other prime examples, another generation of sprinters, worked as assistant coaches with the EL girls’ squad. Tommy and Calvin Hunter blazed up the track for the Eddies in the late 1990s. Even Laroche is a piece of that legacy, having run sprints for the team in the late 1980s.

“We’ve had a run of good athletes come through, and each one seems to come in just as the other is leaving,” Laroche said. “Look at the Hunters, and Colby Brooks, and Johnny Alexander. We’ve been fortunate to have that kid every three or four years that kind of keeps it connected, going all the way back into the mid-80s. A lot of that is luck, and some of it is that we’ve had coaches who worked with these kids. Going back you had Al Harvie, Dan Campbell took over the sprinters for a while, and let’s face it, as the head coach, I am a sprint coach.”

 Ranucci, meanwhile, a junior, is next. But, he said, the pressure isn’t so great because of the team the Eddies have assembled around him. And it may take a year for him to join those who came before him at the top of the state’s list of sprinters. But the base is there.

“It’s not really like sprinting used to be here, with all the high-end sprinters,” Ranucci said, “but we still have a good sprint team. I have to step up and help other guys and myself get that much better. We have a lot of sophomores and freshmen this year, and a lot of good ones, too. Working with them will help.

“You can only rely on yourself during a race, but it helps in practices to have teammates who will help you and push you to be a better runner,” Ranucci added.

Laroche knows exactly where Ranucci is coming from.

“I ran with three of my best friends on a relay team,” Laroche said. “None of the four of us were superstar talent, but all four of us worked hard. When you are part of something like that, you want it to continue, and you want this generation of athletes to have that same kind of experience. That’s part of the reason why the tradition seems to continue here.”

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