Great Kids, Team and Sport: An Overdue Shout-Out to Brevard High Cross Country
Brevard High School's cross country program has quietly emerged as one of the best in the state, thanks partly to the dedication of longtime coach Jackie Witherspoon.
BREVARD — Saya Geer-Hardwick, surrounded by textbooks in the shade of a team tent, managed to squeeze in a few precalculus problems before her cross country meet last Thursday.
Yes, the Brevard High School junior said modestly when interrupted for an interview, she likes to think of herself as a good student, or at any rate, “I work as hard as I can. I really love school.”
With a strikingly polite and articulate manner, she went on to describe the joy of running for its own sake, especially in the forest.
“I like the serenity of it and the fact that you can get lost in your surroundings,” she said. “The rhythm of one footfall after another is just lovely.”
That she is also a top competitor was clear from the results of that day’s Mountain Foothills 7 meet. Saya finished sixth in a field of 36, a stride behind Brevard’s emerging freshman star, Lila Laughridge, whom, afterwards, Saya enthusiastically congratulated on her “awesome” race.
Come to a Brevard High cross country meet, and you’ll find a lot of young people like Saya. Not exactly like her, of course, but unusually thoughtful, hard-working and committed to their sport and teammates.
And pretty darn fast.
Both the boys and girls easily won this meet against the conference’s six other teams, even though the boys ran it less as a race than a workout.
The girls have won four 2-A state championships since 1999 and last year finished second. The boys claimed their first state championship in 2021 and are favored to do so again this year.
That you were probably unaware of this record is hardly surprising, because one other thing that makes cross country kids special is their willingness to labor in obscurity.
This column is intended to right that wrong, to serve as a shout-out to Brevard High’s runners and coaches — Ben Morgan, whose demanding style is credited with much of the team’s recent success, and Jackie Witherspoon, the bedrock on which the program has been built, the nurturer of hundreds of runners in her 29 years on the job.
To understand the net good of such long service, you need to know just how much cross country does for kids.
Life Lessons
Sure, youth sports are generally a wonderful thing, and I’ve got no problem if you want to single out your favorite underpaid or unpaid coach as a community hero. But forgive my bias for cross country and coaches like Witherspoon, because I was a member of the tribe, someone for whom the sight of spray-painted lines on a grass field feels like a homecoming.
Cross country took me in as a shy, skinny teenager, gave me an identity, and — trite but true — taught me a lot of life lessons.
Starting with the most basic: it’s good for you to get outside and move around, all the more so on a course like Brevard High’s — a former airstrip off Greenville Highway framed by distant mountains and lined with shoulder-high banks of wildflowers.
Saya may have been especially eloquent on this subject, but most of the Brevard team members I talked to said that, whether or not they compete in college, they are runners for life.
Take Noah McLauchlin, a senior who was expected to be one of the team’s best racers but is now sidelined with a hip injury. Despite his frustration, he has stepped up to serve as a de facto assistant coach and seemed to be everywhere last Thursday, shouting out encouragement and split times.
Summer training runs in Pisgah National Forest are of a piece with “the other stuff I like to do,” he said. “I like to fish and bike and hike, and running is just another one of those things for me. And being fit is great.”
Because I was by no means a top runner, I’ll leave the description of another of the sport’s lessons — about the confidence gained through achievement — to the Brevard team’s leading expert on this topic, junior Leo Murray.
“Part of it was cemented early for me. We won the state championship when I was a freshman,” said Leo, the team’s top runner, with a personal best of 16:27 over the standard race distance of five kilometers. “The winning feels good and there’s always that to drive for.”
The “Dawgs”
In other words, put in hard work, the value of which is impossible to miss in sport without distractions such as balls and nets, where “practice” mostly just means repeatedly subjecting yourself to agony.
Morgan, a Brevard High history teacher who learned coaching at a top cross country program in Indiana, eschews the theory that the mere accumulation of miles can bring success. His trademark is gut-busting interval workouts and tempo runs.
“The very first day we’re running fast. The day before the state meet, we’re running fast. We’re running fast all the time,” he said. “The kids are already dreading the workout on the Wednesday before the state meet.”
Or maybe ready to embrace it, because they have seen grueling workouts bring success to former teammates such as Witherspoon’s son, Knox, who won the individual state title in 2021 and now competes for Western Carolina University.
He was a talented runner who “was not racing to his potential” when Morgan arrived four years ago, she said.
“I could have said that to him all day long, but Ben just kind of tapped him on the shoulder, and said, ‘You just going to keep running slow for the next year and a half or do you want to run hard?’ ”
As for the current crop of runners, they have bought into Morgan’s approach thoroughly enough to adopt a team nickname from the brutal world of professional football.
They call themselves the “Dawg Pound,” with a “dawg” defined as “someone who just goes out there and gets it,” said junior Avan Hinkle. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you can do it, you’re going to do it because you’re a dawg. That’s just the mentality of this team.”
The Team
Hard workouts and races bring them closer, they say, and so does the awareness that cross country is a collective as well as an individual sport. All, or just about all, of any team’s runners have to place highly for the squad to do the same.
“Ben isn’t afraid to tell them it’s failing if you don’t try,” Witherspoon said. “That gives them a whole sense of obligation and believing and working towards a common goal.”
Notice the emphasis on the word “try.” Cross country runners are described in what can seem like harshly hierarchical terms. Saya is “our number one runner,” Witherspoon said before the race, and Lila is “our number two.”
But from what I saw last week, everyone in a blue “Brevard” singlet gets as much love as anyone else as long as they put in the effort.
After most of the boys finished in a pack at last week’s race, running at a prescribed six-minute-per-mile pace, they lined the course to cheer on slower teammates. And after getting topped off with a little more agony — one of Morgan’s post-race workouts — they cheered on the girls. Just as the girls had cheered for them.
I’ve never heard so many kids refer to their team as a second “family” and seem to mean it, never seen an injured athlete so engaged with his teammates as Noah.
“No other kid would do what he does. He’s a great leader,” Witherspoon said, and then said it again for emphasis. “He’s a great leader.”
Tiger Mom
So is, from my observation, Witherspoon.
She ran varsity cross country for the University of Alabama and has been around the sport most of her life. She knows it as well as anyone, said former longtime Brevard College track and cross country coach Norm Witek, who is also founder and director of the Brevard Distance Runners Camp.
But she’s adopted a longstanding division of labor. One coach, currently Morgan, designs the workouts and focuses on cutting every possible second from runners’ times. Witherspoon provides encouragement and guidance.
“I think what she loves is just being out there with the girls, giving them support and making them do what they are supposed to do,” Witek said. “Her main goal is to make sure they grow up to be very mature young women.”
(And men, because cross country, unusual among high school sports, is a true mixed-gender endeavor. Boys and girls run in separate races, but are on the same team.)
But if Witherspoon is a “motherly” figure, which is how Witek described her, she’s a tiger mom, just as focused on performance in her own way as Morgan is.
“While talent is a major factor in cross country,” she said, “hard work is also a major factor, and I’ve watched a lot of semi-talented or untalented kids, with enough time and proper progression, become successful. And I love that part of coaching.”
Before saying this, she had glanced at her sports watch, as cross country coaches tend to do a lot, and noted that time was ticking down to the 5 pm start of the girl’s race, that the available window for a good warmup was rapidly closing.
“Okay, girls, 4:11,” she said.
After talking about her coaching style, she took one more look at her watch — and at Saya, buried in homework, at her teammates sitting and talking.
“Hey,” she said, sharply. “Now it’s 4:14. Let’s go, let’s go. Let’s get moving!”
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com
Love that you’re giving attention to a sport that few appreciate more than the athletes and coaches involved
Jackie Witherspoon is a gift to the sport and to our community.