No Greater Joy...

CCDS Bucs State Championship XC Team

            The last 14 weeks have flown by faster than I ever imagined.  After my surgery and time completely off in the months of June and July, August came and brought a type of joy I have never experienced before—my first team coaching experience.  I have helped many individuals with their running over the years and volunteered with various teams and groups of runners.  However, working with the Charlotte Country Day School cross-country team brought a fresh, new experience for me as a runner that I will take with me for the rest of my life.

            Coaching in a team setting is a very complex, challenging task.  The amount of moving parts and pieces to the overall team puzzle that factor into daily practices and weekly competitions are very hard to explain unless you have coached a team of your own.  Luckily, I am part of a coaching staff that has a mix of personalities and skills that helped make our team a unit, and solidified opportunities for me to learn and grow virtually every day at practice.  The planning and time spent trying to help each individual athlete reach his or her full potential was a mental battle that I have never experienced myself as an athlete.  A coach can only want so much for his athlete to succeed, and the rest is left up to the individual to take it upon herself to carry the rest of the weight of the task at hand. 

            Competing is why I love being an athlete.  The races are the test that measure the product of the plan and course of action in an athlete’s daily commitment to the sport.  The coach guides this process and the product is out of the coach’s hand as the day of the race approaches.  This fact is what makes the sport of running so beautiful to me.  I can’t do anything for my athletes on the day of the race except instill the confidence in them that I know they are ready to perform.

            Our final test of this 2015 XC season was on Friday at the State Championship cross-country meet here in Charlotte, North Carolina--on our home course at McAlpine Creek Park.  We compete in the 3A division of the North Carolina Independent Schools Athletic Association (NCISAA).  There were 21 teams that competed in each of the boys and girls championship races.  The CCDS boys team was ranked 9^th and the CCDS girls team was ranked 7^th going into Friday’s meet.  Cross-Country is a very unique sport in the fact that every place in the race matters, every runner is important, and every second can make or break your teams’ success.  A prime example of this was shown in the results of our two teams at the state meet.  Our boys finished 7^th as a team with 185 points, however, both the 5^th and 6^th place teams had a score of 184.  We tied our highest finish ever as a team at the state meet, but just two points separated up from the elite top 5 spots in the state.  Our girls team finished 11^th as a team with 250 points, however the 9^th and 10^th place teams each had 247 points.  Although we had some injury and sickness that plagued our girls’ team late in the season, only 3 points separated us from a final top 10 ranking. 

Junior Ella Dunn kicking to a 3rd place overall finish with a time of 19:12.

            I cannot express or put into words how proud I am of our team.  The first time trial of the season in August had me thinking that it would have been great progress to just field a team on both sides that just finished the 5k distance, and we proved that we can compete with some of the best teams in the state by season's end.  I hope that our athletes learned about training and taking care of their bodies this season.  I hope that our athletes learned how to push themselves beyond what their minds thought they could achieve.  But most importantly, it was beautiful to see this group transformed as actual runners within a few short months--truly enjoying the sport and working towards a goal greater than themselves individually and as a team. I know I will carry this piece of the sport with me forever--these months with my fellow coaches as well as the boys and girls of Charlotte Country Day School--and I cannot wait until 2016 for XC season to kick-off once again.  The Bucs will be in force greater than ever before, and I will be lucky enough to have a front row seat. Go Bucs!