by Dan Oberer and Cory Pfanner
For the first time in four years, the Perkins High School boy’s cross country team won the Erie County Championships.
The event is held at Mills Creek, where the race annually pits each of the county’s six cross country teams in a battle to decide area supremacy. Unlike usual high school cross country races, however, which are 3.1 miles in length, the Erie County Championships is a short, yet grueling, 2-mile race. In this year’s version, the boys from Perkins set the tone, as they won by an astonishing 19 points.
Leading the way for the Pirates was senior co-captain Kyle Rohrbacher, who was the overall winner with a scintillating time of 11:08. Also, setting the pace for the young, yet promising, group were junior Bill Fial and sophomore Michael Decker, who ran 11:26 and 11:28 respectively. The team win was the first in four years for the program, as well as the first for second-year head coach Chris Smith, which begs the question: why has it taken so long for a program, which once won three state titles in a row, to win a cross country meet?
“Numbers,” said Smith. “The team didn’t have good numbers for a few years.” The season after state champion Cory Leslie and fellow state qualifier Michael Ahner graduated, the team could at best be described as thin, and that’s being generous. From 2006-2008 in the waning years of former coach Paul Leslie’s tenure as head coach, the squad annually maxed out between 10 and 12 runners.
At the same time, the loss of numbers resulted in a talent decrease. As Ahner said, “numbers breed talent. The greater the selection of runners, the more likely there is to be an abundance of talent.” Unfortunately, talent was hard to come by on a meager squad of only ten in which seven of those runners formed the varsity top seven. The only justification for the drop in numbers was losing two multi-year state qualifiers in Leslie and Ahner. For that reason, many possible runners shied away from the program, because they felt it was unlikely that they would succeed.
In the subsequent years, putting a solid squad together was no simple task, as the team was composed of a single junior, four sophomores and five freshman. Captains Kyle Rohrbacher and Dom Pasqualini, who were both sophomores during Coach Leslie’s final season in 2008, had a combined three years of running experience. As a result, the only people the runners had to look up to were the shadows of two great runners of Perkins’ past. That is, until the entire makeup of the team was altered the following season.
Entering the 2009 cross country season, Smith received the head coaching job, after the elder Leslie declined an offer to return. The impact wasn’t immediate, but it was obvious. First on Smith’s agenda was to set lofty goals and aspirations. In the beginning, workouts didn’t differ much from those of Leslie’s era; however, new workouts were slowly incorporated into the plan.
“The biggest difference in how we ran and how we’re running is the culture,” Smith said. “There’s been a culture change in how we view competitive running. The biggest challenge has been getting kids to understand that they can perform to the level that I know they’re capable of achieving.” Currently, Smith’s training philosophy is based on a quick buildup of mileage, followed by an array of speed workouts and threshold runs.
Smith said, “Being successful has been a real challenge without any senior leadership.” Lack of leadership has had an impact on the achievements of the team. In fact, this season is the first since 2007 in which the team has had any seniors on the roster. Smith also added that the most important key to success has been, “young underclassmen who are willing to work harder.”
Possibly the most notable impact Smith has brought to the team is work ethic. Knowing firsthand what it takes to make it to the highest level in Ohio, he refuses to take no for an answer. He doesn’t push his runners to do more than they want to, but he expects the ones who want to be the most successful to go above and beyond during practice.
Accordingly, training is rarely easy. Any one runner will put in anywhere from 20 to 50 miles a week, with the majority running over 100 miles in any given month. Smith has even turned mileage into a personal challenge for each member of the team. This past summer he created mileage clubs: 300 miles, 400 miles and 500 miles, which represent the miles ran for each individual between the start of conditioning in June and the beginning of September. If a runner made it into one of the clubs, he received a T-shirt, a dry fit T-shirt, or a warm-up suit with each successive mileage milestone.
The toughest week the team faces occurs in the final months of summer, when Smith loads up a school van with enough food to feed an army and catches a ferry boat to Kelley’s Island for training camp. The trip lasts less than five full days, but they are the five highest mileage days of the summer. Within hours of settling in, it’s already time for the first run.
Throughout the five days, the team runs a total of nine times, doubling up on all, but the last day. Mileage totals for the week range anywhere from 40 to 60, which are much higher than a typical week would entail. One may ask, “Why is all the hard mileage important?” Smith believes that mileage is vital for the same reason that two-a-days are critical for football. As Smith is notorious for saying: “You will race like you train.”
Upon becoming head coach, Smith made it his personal goal to return the struggling boy’s cross country program to its previous level of dominance seen prior to this decade. As of yet, he is succeeding. In the two years since he has become head coach, Smith has seen his squad grow from the aforementioned ten to a current roster of twenty runners.
For the first time in three years, the team is now led by a group of seniors. Additionally, there are also many underclassmen waiting in the wings, who are striving to regain the program’s prominence. Combined with the overall change of culture and the team’s dramatic increase in numbers and work ethic, the current team has seen its times drop dramatically. In cross country, running any race in under 19:00 earns the runner a varsity letter. In 2008, the year prior to Smith taking over, the group had four runners under that mark. Last year, the total increased to eight. This year the team already has nine letter winners, and there are still at least three races remaining.
Heading into next Saturday’s conference meet, the team is one of the favorites, if not the favorite, to win the meet, and the coach intends to keep it that way. Looking into the future, Smith said that he not only hopes, but he “expects every year to win SBC’s, districts, and get to Columbus (for the state meet).”
