By Katherine Lucas | MileSplit USA
They grew up racing together in Colorado, learning and training together through middle and high school in Texas, and choosing – unanimously – to keep going together at BYU. Robin Latta didn’t set out to build a program. She set out to raise daughters. Here is what transpired.
Robin Latta grew up in an athletic family in Kansas. Her brother was an exceptional runner and sprinter who has now coached at the collegiate level for more than 25 years. Running was always part of her life, but Robin was a volleyball player who had never run cross country before college. In her senior year of high school, a freak volleyball accident tore her ACL.
She entered college still recovering from that serious injury while also learning an entirely new sport. Coming back from an ACL injury while taking on cross country for the first time was challenging, to say the least. That experience – the injury, the patience, the long road back – gave her a perspective on training and athlete development that didn’t fully make sense to her until much later, when she had five daughters who ran and a responsibility to know why everything she asked of them was worth asking.
She never set out to be a coach. She set out to raise five good people. The running came later. And then it didn’t stop coming.
The five Latta girls – Addy, Iris, Elin, Remy, and Reese, all close in age, impossibly close as sisters – found youth cross country in Colorado when they were little. It fit the family. Five girls who could train together, race together, travel together, and be outside together.
“Running shoes,” Robin notes, “were a lot cheaper than horses.” They had tried horses. They had tried dance, tennis, hiking, all of it. Youth cross country stuck.
The results came because the foundation was right, because Robin was more interested in where her daughters would be in ten years than in what they ran at age fifteen. As they became more serious about running, she became increasingly interested in understanding how young athletes develop and how to help them improve without sacrificing their long-term health for short-term results.
“I’ve always looked at this as a long game,” she says. “I don’t believe in taking a talented young runner and finding out how much training she can survive.”
Now Elin and Iris – fraternal twins, Class of 2028 – run in the national high school conversation. Remy and Reese – adopted twins, also Class of 2028 – have grown into athletes with real ambitions and real futures. Addy, the oldest, has taken a different path, one shaped by a congenital hip condition and summer coursework through Johns Hopkins and the University of Rochester in biomedical engineering and orthopedics. And all four younger sisters are headed to BYU together, to run for Coach Diljeet Taylor, in what Robin describes as the natural next chapter – not a surprise, not a compromise, but the place where staying together felt exactly right.
The Latta girls are quick to tell you that running is not the whole story. All five are drawn toward engineering, medicine, and healthcare – fields that require the same discipline and curiosity they bring to training. Between them they carry heavy AP course loads, strong academic records, and ambitions that extend well beyond any finish line. Running is part of who they are. It just isn’t all of it.
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