Lady Spartan cross country program celebrates 10 years at the top

Last month, the Mountain Brook Varsity Girls Cross Country Team won its 10th consecutive 6A Alabama High School Athletic Association Championship. Under the leadership of Coach Greg Echols, the team finished seven runners in the top 20 and had no one place below 43 from a field of 199.

The program has become a dynasty thanks to the careful balance of coaching, companionship and fun that hold it in place.

“My philosophy is I envision a system where kids can take risks and succeed,” Echols said when asked how his system took shape over three decades of coaching. “A lot of my workouts are designed to teach (students) to tolerate pain levels, but many are designed to encourage camaraderie. Both create a tendency for girls to lean on each other. To me, that’s what my job is – to get these kids to believe in themselves and work together.”

That philosophy to Echols, in a nutshell, is the importance of being on a team – an idea required to craft a legacy in cross country running. At meets, the score is determined not only by who on the team crosses first but also by who crosses last. Of the 10-member squad, the first five to finish are scored, and the last three can bring that score down.

So one way Echols builds his teams is like all other programs – he has them suffer together. They run 40 miles a week beginning in mid-August and are encouraged to run up to 400 more during the summer. Fore some students, it can be as many as 1,000 miles a year.

“I’m selling that I want them to hurt and like it,” Echols said. “I want them to deal with their fear of failure or their fears of getting last, or dying or not living up to expectations. I teach them to be comfortable, and if they know no matter how they perform that they’ll still be loved, they’ll be more likely to find new levels of what their body is capable of doing.”

Pain becomes a building block, but, from that pain, so does friendship. And Echols starts both processes early by bringing junior high runners into the varsity program as soon as seventh grade.

Leslie Boozer, a former member of the Lady Spartan team, competed on Nov. 17 in the NCAA national cross country championship as Georgia Bulldog. She was pulled up to the varsity team when she was in seventh grade and became part of the foundation for Mountain Brook’s dynasty. Now, as a college senior, she said she had no idea how well Echols’ system was preparing her at the time.

“The older girls really took us under their wings,” Boozer said. “We really did not know what we were doing, and none realized how good we were until we looked back. The coaches do great job of keeping a low pressure environment where we focus on teammates and doing what we love.”

At the 2012 state meet, held at Oakville Indian Mounds Park, Ala., on Nov. 10, sophomore Jessica Molloy was the second runner to finish the more than three-mile course. Her time, 17:29.59, was nine seconds behind the leader and ahead of the third place finisher by more than a minute.

Molloy can also attest to the differences in Mountain Brook’s program when compared to others. She recently joined the team after relocating from Arizona, where she said the environment was more serious, and younger girls weren’t allowed to run varsity. She said it shaped the way she acts toward her teammates.

“I’m as nice as I can be to our eighth and ninth grade runners. They are so blessed to be on team like this,” Molloy said. “Where I came from, as an eighth grader I could not get pulled up. You’ve got to give them a hard time sometimes, but they’re such a great aspect of the team. They get so pumped every time they’re on line. They’re just so excited they run out of their minds.”

For the rest of the Spartans, senior Ann Sisson placed sixth (18:54.04). Shortly after, two younger members of the team, eighth grader Parker Cobbs and freshman Frances Patrick, placed ninth and 10th with times of 19:12.24 and 19:12.25 respectively.

Crossing the line in 15th was senior Kendall Reed (19:20.51), rounding out Mountain Brook’s contributions to the 2012 All-State team. Only the top 15 finishers make All-State, and last year Reed barely missed the distinction by placing 16th.

“It means so much to me,” she said. “I definitely couldn’t have done that without thinking of the other girls on the team and how hard they were running. I didn’t want to let them down.”

Reed is the most seasoned Lady Spartan on the 2012 team, first contributing as a junior high student as some of her teammates are doing now.

Echols said the current team has several young girls who are learning from a compassionate group of upperclassmen, just as Boozer did nearly a decade ago. It sets a pace for the positive attitude of the Lady Spartans to continue to spread and their dynasty to grow.

“These girls aren’t just friends – they’re teammates,” Reed said. “And a teammate is something different than a friend. They will lay it on line no matter what, and a friend won’t always do that.”