The Chilkat Valley News headline last week read, “Glacier Bears defend state champ title.”
But what Glacier Bear runners achieved in the past few years is bigger than that. Boys and girls teams from Haines High School have won a combined four state championships and five regional championships in three years.
That’s an unprecedented number of consecutive titles in any sport in the school’s history, at least in the 50 years since school sports were extended to young women.
And the number of state championship titles would likely be higher yet if Haines runners had been able to run at the state cross-country meet last year. A policy then prohibited schools from towns with low COVID-19 numbers, like Haines, to travel to places with high COVID-19 numbers like Anchorage, blocked the Glacier Bears from participating.
“It would have been more if we’d have gone to state last year. The girls’ team was strong,” coach Jordan Baumgartner said this week. As it is, there will be nine new flags hanging from the rafters in the school gym.
I asked Baumgartner what accounted for the team’s success.
“They started young,” he said. “They all participated in middle school cross-country. They enjoyed it and they stuck with it.”
Plus, he said, “They’re all active kids. They come from active families. If they’re not running, they’re out hiking up Mount Ripinsky.”
That formula is no secret. News stories about the Haines girls’ basketball team, which struggled for years, also returned to the same lesson. Students in other towns start into hoops at a younger age than Haines players, and they play year-round.
Coach Baumgartner inherited his runners from former coaches Chandler Kemp and Alixanne Goodman. Kemp, now an engineer working in Juneau, credited Baumgartner with the team’s recent successes.
Kemp and Goodman’s squads always picked up four or five junior high runners, but Baumgartner created an official program for those grade levels and more than doubled those numbers, Kemp said. A collegiate runner and the standing Mount Ripinsky Run record-holder, Kemp himself didn’t start running every day until ninth grade.
“They’re doing well. It’s a fun thing to see,” Kemp said.
Baumgartner said the recent change in divisions also should be noted. Because of its low enrollment numbers, Haines no longer competes against teams Mount Edgecumbe and Sitka. But similar things were said a decade ago when Haines won two state championships in boys’ basketball in three years in a division that included Edgecumbe and Sitka.
The truth is that schools compete against comparably-sized schools, and at every level teams compete against their peers.
The truth also is that if the school basketball teams racked up this many titles, the town would be buying players Lamborghinis.
As John R. Powers wrote in his hilarious novel about high school, the difference between football and cross-country is that when you score a touchdown, the cheerleaders swoon, the crowd cheers, and everyone tells you what a great guy you are, whereas in cross-country you run through the cold, wet woods in your underwear and when you get to the finish line and puke you get a popsicle stick with a number on it.
Cross-country is not a glamorous sport. Nor is it a spectator sport. It’s a grueling, internal contest between a runner and himself. In that sense, the competition is so much harder to beat.
And the victories are that much more impressive.