Mountain Brook girls win 12th straight state cross-country title
Mountain Brook High’s girls cross-country program has had so much success, it’s easy to take it for granted that Greg Echols’ Lady Spartans will win another state championship.
When you’ve won 11 straight, 12 of 13 and 21 overall, it just seems like a foregone conclusion.
The Lady Spartans cross-country team won the Class 7A state championship at Oakville Indian Mounds Park for their 12th straight state championship.
But the route the girls took this year to the title was anything but easy.
“We lost eight of our top 13 girls to injuries or illness. We lost three before the season started,” Echols said. “Mono, stress fractures, you name it. It was just one of those years.”
Still, Mountain Brook finished with 41 points, far ahead of Huntsville (59) and Hoover (79) to win the title.
Mountain Brook junior Frances Patrick (19:01.95) was fourth, and Lily Hulsey (19:07.13) crossed the finish line in seventh place to pace the Lady Spartans. Anna Balzli (19:20.44) was 10th, and also in the top 14 were Cameron Hudson and Tessa Allen, at 13 and 14, respectively. Joy McRae and Natalie Jones were 21st and 34th to round out the scorers.
“Frances just ran great,” Echols said. “She’s a junior, and when we lost our veteran runners, she had to step up and really take a leadership role in workouts as well as emotionally. When you’re No. 2 or 3, you work hard, but there’s no real pressure. But when you become No. 1, you have to get it done every day in practice and in races.
“She had a great race and has just been a tremendous leader the past month and I’m really proud of her.”
The injuries meant Echols had to move up girls from the junior high. That’s where the development of the grassroots program paid big dividends.
“That’s a huge part of (our success),” Echols said. “Part of it is we’ve got great staff there that loves kids and gets the numbers out. Part of it is we’re always that we’re on the same page. I coached both my high school assistants and three of the junior high coaches when they came through, so it makes it a little easier that we all have same philosophies and ideas of what we’re trying to accomplish with the kids.”
Although it may seem like cross-country is an individual sport, it really isn’t. At state, the top five scorers count toward the team total. So it’s important to have your top runners do well, but even those back in the pack have to give their best efforts to score highly enough for the team to win — even if they’re having a bad day.
“I’ve had kids write senior essays for me that (say) they never knew what a team was until they got on the cross- country team. They’ve been in team sports their whole lives and had no clue until they got on cross-country.”
The physical demands of the workouts, the lack of a lot of press clippings and attention and, as Echols put it, “some sick man like me” pushing them through difficult workouts mean that runners have to lean on each other for support and they start to bond.
“Especially if your goal is to be in the top 20 and you see you’re not going to be in the top 20, it’s easy to quit. But if your teammates are counting on you, you can’t quit on your teammates once you’ve got that bond.”
All the difficult times made it special to win this 12th straight title.
“Girls on the varsity kept watching their teammates go down and keep their focus and work even harder to fill the gap. And they meshed with the younger girls. I watched several of them mature and grow, had to step up and do more than they really wanted to do whether it was leadership or whether it’s just having to work harder to fill the gap.”
The Mountain Brook boys finished third behind Auburn and Hoover. Marshall Smith paced the Spartans with a 17th-place finish.
“They ran great,” Echols said. “It’s the youngest boys team I’ve ever put on the line. For their age, they absolutely competed super well. They actually went out too fast to see if they could finish higher and ran out of gas a little bit, but I’d rather have a team that has the courage to go out after the teams in front of them. I was just super proud of them.”