Cross country at Athens Drive has brought many advantages to its runners, including togetherness, hard work, and help with future choices. These advantages prove to be important to both the runners and the coaches of the team and its future.
“Throughout practice, you work with your team and run together, so you kind of push each other,” said Lauren Hagg, a junior at Athens Drive who is part of the cross country team.
Teams and individuals run races on outdoor courses over natural terrain. Every member of the team gets to participate in every meet, and points are awarded to individual runners in each team. Only the first five runners are counted to the team’s score. Cross country revolves more around stamina rather than in track and field, where it’s not just running but long jump, shot put, and pole vaulting.
“Through running in cross country, you run long distances, and you sort of have to work with that,” Hagg said.
Cross country is a sport that Athens offers for students to engage in along with their peers. In the sense that it has brought togetherness and impacted many students’ lives including their head coach, Lori Lair. Lair started out in the fall of 2012, just wanting to help the cross-country team behind the head coach and assistant coach at the time. She was allowed to become co-head coach along with Lauren Barrett.
“No team cuts allow for people to want to do better,” Hagg said.
With no team cuts, as long as a student is dedicated to coming and trying to get better at the sport, they will always be welcomed on the team. Being fast isn’t the most important aspect of the team. Instead, improving over time is seen as more important. Anyone can be the slowest runner and still continue to try and improve themselves as the season progresses.
“Improving yourself is harder because you have to work over weekends, especially when you don’t want to,” said Hagg
The sport also paves the way for long-lasting connections to develop both between students as well as the coaches and students. Those long-lasting connections improve togetherness, and the strong bond that coaches and students start to form with each other, which goes as far as students being assistant coaches to their former coaches.
“We see the growth throughout the whole thing, and we get to know students a lot better, whereas with a student you might just have for a semester, we have many of them all four years,” said Lair.
Cross country makes it easy for runners to set personal goals as well as team goals. Running requires discipline, so making sure a certain goal to reach for them is really helpful, even if the goal is not met, there is still a drive to continue running and helping both yourself and the team.
“I had a lot of friends on the team, and they kind of encouraged me to join, so I started last year,” said Ben Steet, junior.
Steet is a part of the cross country team and has been running since last year. Steet notices and enjoys the connection that cross country brings to both him and his teammates.
“It is a good hobby to have and increases the longevity of your life,” said Steet.
Even though cross-country running requires a lot of hard work and commitment, it is a sport that encourages togetherness and friendship between teammates and coaches. Encouraging each other to do better and push beyond their limits is always a way for runners on the team to succeed.
“I’m thinking of running in college, and just my entire life, and just keeping that habit, keep the motivation, and keep running and keep improving my time,” said Steet.
Running follows students to college, and opens the way to many different opportunities for the different runners on the team, at the end of the day it is all about togetherness and working as a team together.
“I hope that for the future of cross country, it continues to grow as a sport. I hope that the number of places we get to run increases and we start to see more growth on the girl’s side,” Lair said.
