Pondering the Fayetteville-Manlius Phenomenon

From the opening stages of the NXN Girls Championship race, Fayetteville-Manlius was in undisputed control. Photo by Alan Versaw.

Like a lot of other coaches, my teams have now lost to the Fayetteville-Manlius girls more than once. It's not just that we lost--we were beaten soundly. We were beaten in a way we are certainly not accustomed to being beaten. I can't help but ask why and have spent some time thinking that over the last couple of days.

In the thoughts that follow, I'm drawing from four sources: my observations of Fayetteville-Manlius at NXN, including comments that Bill and John Aris made at the coaches' clinic following the NXN races in Portland on Saturday, reports that have reached me second and third hand, the article on F-M that Running Times magazine ran in October of 2008, and speculation. To the fullest extent possible, I'm drawing upon the comments the coaches themselves made and the inferences I drew from the same.

So, what makes Fayetteville-Manlius so dominant?

Fayetteville-Manlius is a school of approximately 1500 students, not especially large and especially not so by NXN standards. According to the reports given by the coaches, they had approximately 20 girls out for cross country this fall.

While the boys at Fayetteville-Manlius have enjoyed their own share of success, my comments are turned in the direction of the girls' team. It is currently the F-M girls who are the riddle that must be solved.

The talk given by Coaches Aris on Saturday left no doubt that the program is a high-commitment kind of program. No surprise there. Comments made during the presentation and other information generally "out there" about the program suggests that the girls run together every day. The fact that one of the girls specifically mentioned in a post-race interview how strange it was to not run together on Thanksgiving suggests that even a one-day lapse in the routine is rather unusual. Diet has been repeated as part of the program of success for F-M by numerous sources. Large amounts of mileage and extensive hill work are likewise recurring themes.

Let's take these items in order.

If you have a bit of the pied piper in your blood, you can--as a coach--get at least a small number of kids from a school of almost any size to commit to any reasonable training regimen. All the more so if you have a demonstrated pattern of success. It is almost axiomatic that the level of commitment the Coaches Aris have been able to ask of the kids has grown in measure with the success of the teams. You can build your expectations as your resume justifies it.

Bill and John Aris make no bones about the size of their program. They don't want a large program--they want a program of very highly committed kids. To the extent that numbers are relevant, it may turn out that less really is more where the goals of this program are concerned. I assume they bring kids along at volumes and intensities of training that are appropriate to their running background. But I'm also guessing that, even for newcomers to the program, the volumes and intensities demanded are sufficient to disperse the chaff of uncommitted wannabes. And, I surmise that it's not merely a commitment of kids, but a commitment of their families as well. Speculating here, there is likely an expectation that family trips and such are largely scheduled around the training schedule. And that is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm inclined to believe it didn't start out that way. Once you have risen to a certain level of achievement, however, you can tack on all manner of expectations that would be perceived as ludicrous and inexcusable in the absence of a proven track record.

To have seven girls running at the nearly-matched sort of level the F-M girls demonstrated in Portland this last weekend would require something on the order of a minimum of 50 miles per week of volume per individual. I suspect it's more than that for at least most of those girls. If my hunch is correct, that would translate into a minimum of 7 hours of running per individual per week, plus an indeterminate amount of time spent on ancillary activities.

And about diet? It is beyond question that the F-M girls have better dietary habits than almost the entire nation, and quite possibly almost the entire nation of high school cross country runners. Certainly the coaches Aris have spoken about the importance of diet, though I'm at a loss to uncover any specifics of what their program asks of the kids.

This is not to say, however, that the commitment to dietary soundness is forever and absolute. Worth noting is the fact that the F-M girls' table was scattered with empty pop cans, more than one per seat, following last Saturday's dinner at the Nike campus. Apparently, winning the national title brought at least a brief reprieve from the usual dietary expectations of the program.

Regarding the nature of their training, geography dictates that F-M runs a lot of hills. There simply aren't many other options in their neck of the woods. Combine that with the fact that F-M identifies cross country as their point of emphasis among the three seasons (cross country, indoor, and outdoor) and you have a basic understanding of the fundamental orientation of their training.

Perhaps a couple of observations on the personality types of the coaches are in order as well. Of the two, Bill Aris is both the more gifted speaker and the one more comfortable in front of a crowd. Clearly, he believes in what he is doing--as all successful coaches do. Doubtless, he, like all humans, has private moments of self-doubt, but the public persona doesn't show much, if any, of that. In my one experience of listening to John Aris, he seemed ill at ease with the task of being in front of a large group of people. Things are likely different in smaller, more intimate, settings such as you would find with a cross country team.

Conclusions

The fact that Fayetteville-Manlius can dominate the national scene of high school cross country for four years running (and with no end in sight) with a team numbering about 20 public high school student-athletes underscores one very important point--there is plenty of talent walking the hallways in every school of any reasonable size in this nation. Unless your school is down around 250 or fewer students, let's all stop making excuses about the sizes of our schools.

The number one obstacle to great cross country performances for any school is getting the talent out of the hallways and onto the course. Clearly, F-M has done that--perhaps better than any other school in the nation.

And getting the right kids out for cross country requires a pied piper kind of personality. Not necessarily a pied piper to all personality types--Bill Aris does not strike me as that kind of person--but a pied piper to the driven, I'm-okay-with-beating-myself-to-a-pulp-to-accomplish-something personality types. Almost every community has one or two such pied pipers. Sometimes it's the soccer coach; sometimes it's the drama director. At Fayetteville-Manlius HS, it's the cross country coach(es). And it will be the cross country coach at whatever school first topples the dynasty that F-M girls cross country has become.

The geographical accident of Fayetteville-Manlius being surrounded by hilly country is also a contributing factor. Not insignificant, but also not ultimately determinative. Just as training at altitude doesn't resolve all issues for Colorado cross country programs, so also training on a steady diet of hills doesn't resolve all issues for F-M. But it helps. The first team that takes them will likely also have some local geographical factor playing in their favor as well.

Diet is just one of the scourges afflicting this nation, but it is indisputably a scourge. The pop-cans-on-the-table story related above illustrates this one fact: even F-M is potentially vulnerable on this score. But, I'd venture to say they keep a tighter rein their vulnerabilities better than most. And that takes conscious, daily effort. They surely recognize there is a vital (long-term) connection between what goes into their bodies and the performances they're ultimately able to ask their bodies to deliver.

You may be certain of this much, the team that first topples Fayetteville-Manlius will not be a newly-dominant program. It takes years to reach the kind of level of success F-M is enjoying. As alluded to earlier in this piece, it takes years to bring a program to the level where you can even ask for, much less receive, the kind of student and parental buy-in and sacrifice that F-M depends on. It takes years to develop the base of training to support the kind of performances their teams deliver. Little steps each year, there is no other way up that mountain.

Even in suburbia where the parental desire to have a child be recognized as a star athlete often rages unchecked and exhibits itself in ridiculous extremes, it takes more than a simple, indiscriminate kind of mere desire. It takes a resolute (some might say fanatical), self-sacrificing commitment to a singular goal.

In order to beat Fayetteville-Manlius, it is imperative that the team of destiny competes according to a schedule that places final and determinative emphasis on winning the national title, to the detriment of any and all subsidiary titles that precede it. F-M has already given up the Feds meet in New York because it detracts from the ultimate goal of winning at NXN. The team that one day beats F-M will have given up something of former value in their schedule in order to get there. Maybe more than one something. Count on it.

Training? It should go without saying that it takes year-round training, most of which is strength-oriented, base-building in nature. Be careful about dabbling in casual forms of recreation; you don't have time for that any longer. At least not during the school year. It takes a commitment to building core strength to improve mechanics and harden bodies against injury. Ladies and gentlemen, it's not going to happen any other way.

You say the weather isn't conducive to year-round training where you live? It isn't in upstate New York, either.

And that raises the ultimate question--is it worth all of this? Isn't the picture I've drawn a picture of fanatical commitment to what is ultimately an ephemeral cause? Very possibly so, though I would be the first to want to save space for the idea that many important enduring lessons may be drawn through commitment to ephemeral activities.

I am the coach of what most would regard as a very successful cross country program. Not a few locals regard me as being a little over-the-top in my own right. We've been to NXN the last two years, and I am not at all sure that the commitment I would have to take on in order to seriously challenge F-M is a commitment that I should, or even can, take on. If I am uncertain of taking it on for myself, I dare not ask kids to take it on. Even if I was personally willing to take it on, that fact alone would not provide adequate justification for imposing that level of commitment as an expectation for the kids in our program. And, as long as these questions trouble my mind, our program is unlikely in the extreme to be the team that someday takes down Fayetteville-Manlius.

Perhaps the questions, and answers, are different on another team.

Clearly, Bill and John Aris's commitment to cross country at F-M exceeds my commitment at my own high school. I've stared down the possibility of adding another layer of commitment to our program, and I've rejected that possibility. I've done it more than once. And I don't know what new piece of information would make me change my mind somewhere down the road.

To whatever coach leads the program that will someday end the Fayetteville-Manlius stranglehold on national supremacy, I trust you will first find the right way to do it. And, after you have done that, I trust you will share it with the rest of us.