The Shadow
It can be seen at just about every meet.
An athlete will have a T-shirt on that proudly reads ….
“Our sport is your sports’ punishment.”
The sport is cross country.
And Alleghany is darn good at it.
Last Wednesday in Salem, the Mountaineer boys team did something that the program hadn’t done in 29 seasons. In fact, no team sport at the school had achieved it in nine years.
They won a regional title.
The championship wasn’t a flash in the pan and it wasn’t a one-day wonder — it was something Alleghany coach Jeremy Bartley dreamed of and had been working toward for going on seven years.
That’s when he talked the school board into letting him start a cross country team at Clifton Middle School.
Bartley coached the team for free for the first six years.
And practices were, and still are, held alongside the varsity Mountaineers on a daily basis.
Bartley recruited the likes of the Honaker twins, Mason and Erik, Levi Counts, Andrew Peck, David Donnan, Randall Deschler, Jeffrey Harris and Connor McPeek among others.
The first CMS groups had plenty of guidance.
“In middle school, we got to look up and see all the high school runners,” said Mason Honaker. “Our sixth grade year Gaige Kern was a senior so we got to watch him run. That was really inspirational.”
Kern ran at Virginia Tech, while Cedric Drennen, another mentor to the current group, is a two-time All-Mountain East runner at Concord University.
And then there is Bartley, who oversees the program along with his wife, Erin, who became the first paid CMS cross country coach this fall, and assistant coach Seth Davis.
Jeremy Bartley has been there and done that in the running world, qualifying for two state cross country meets at Alleghany in the 1990’s and going on to run at Concord.
And as a physical education teacher at both Callaghan and Sharon elementary schools, he has an inside track at recruiting young kids to a sport that has no feeder system through the local recreation departments.
“He’s a really great coach,” said Peck of Bartley. “He doesn’t just pay attention to the high schoolers, he pays attention to the sixth graders too. That makes them want to keep running.”
Counts, who won all-region honors last week, found his niche a few years back.
“I just wanted to try something new,” said Counts thinking back. “I’d done a bunch of other sports, but none really suited me. I started out and I wasn’t good. But it was addicting and I got good and I wanted to get better. I just stuck with it.”
Erik Honaker, who was the third place finisher at the regional, pointed squarely at Bartley for getting him started.
“I had Mr. Bartley in gym class and I liked to run a lot,” Erik said. “He recruited me from there. As soon as I started I just didn’t want to stop.”
Bartley’s group hasn’t stopped running and last week the fruit of their labor was a Class 2, Region C team championship.
On Saturday morning, the Mountaineers will be in the mix at the Class 2 state championship meet at Green Hill Park in Salem. And next year, the top seven runners all return.
“A bunch of these kids that are on the team now are from my elementary school PE program,” Bartley said. “You try and recruit a lot of kids because the attrition rate is probably like any other sport.
“The kids that have stuck with it — you know, they are all in,” he continued. “The kids that I have now on the high school team have been with me from five years ago or six years ago. They are 100 percent cross country. They give me everything they’ve got. They got the recipe at an early age and they’ve run with it.”
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(Gavin Dressler Photo)
