Cross country off and running again for Gig Harbor Tides
In her long and storied career, Patty Ley has seen almost everything that cross country and track can throw at her.
However, the year 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic had different plans and not only derailed the spring track season, it also pushed back the fall cross country season to February.
Now with two races in the new Season One schedule, the Gig Harbor High School cross country team is starting to find some familiar footing even when things seem so different.
“It’s huge, simply the timing of when the season [will be]. Going from last year, basically losing all of track, trying to figure out what the summer would be and then losing the summer,” said the hall of fame coach. “We started some stuff in late fall but not the season, so it just confuses the whole rhythm of the year.”
Under familiar circumstances, the Tides’ cross country season would be ten weeks long and begin in the summer; with the runners gradually pushing themselves for better results once competitions begin when the weather turns colder.
Now as a Season One sport that has begun in February, cross country is limited to a six-week schedule, so there is not a lot of time spent building the proper racing skills Ley wants to instill in her runners.
“You just have to change what your expectations are going to be,” Ley said. “We’re going to approach this as mostly just another training phase with a little bit of a bump so they can get some good time and scores near the end of it. Anything else I might do might get them hurt so we are going to try and avoid that.”
Ley won’t be the only one facing the challenges of the Tides’ situation, as the runners will also have some new things to get used to.
Like all other sports the Tides have participated in during Season One, they will be competing against the 4A South Puget Sound League teams. This means that there are different runners to compete against as well as new places to run at.
Where the Tides hosted Bellarmine and Sumner for the first two meets, their next one is visiting Graham-Kapowsin on unfamiliar territory.
“Right now, it’s about the opportunities to do some things,” Ley said. “The state requirements are that they have to have masks on throughout… We have really emphasized social distancing everywhere, and they’ve been pretty good about it. We have told them masks on all the time at practice.”
One interesting thing about cross country that sets them apart from all the other Season One sports is that if a runner is separated enough from the pack, then they can drop the mask as they run.
However, rules still state that they must start at the line with a mask on and finish the race with a mask on as well. But that all depends if the runner decides they want to take off the mask; nothing requires them to take it off at any point.
One standout runner for the Tides is junior Will Newberg. Having entered the program as a freshman and not knowing what he was doing, Newberg has steadily evolved into a strong runner for Ley’s program.
“He’s spent more time in the offseason running, he’s gotten stronger, he’s developed pretty well,” Ley said. “He is learning to [get in] control, sometimes he gets a little ahead of himself. He’s got some great talent, he’s got some great opportunities but sometimes he trains and tries to race at a level that he will be at but he’s not quite there.”
In the two races that Newberg has run in so far this season, he has two top-10 finishes. In the first dual meet against Bellarmine, the junior finished the 4,000 meter race in fifth place with a time of 14 minutes and 5.9 seconds.
Against Sumner, he ran the same distance with a time of 14:19.5 for an eighth place spot.
Newberg is one the older runners on the team, and has shown that he wants to put in the work to be a great runner for the Tides. Fortunately, he and the rest of his teammates won’t lose this year to cancellations and will continue their positive trajectory of improvement this year.
“It’s like spring training where you’ve got some competition but they’re not as heavily weighted,” Ley said. “You don’t have to feel the weight of trying to win… we’ve talked about that. Sometimes a kid won’t take the same kind of risk because there is too much involved during the season… This is a chance to make those mistakes so come fall, you’re not making those mistakes and you can really advance and do really well.”