The Midlothian team awaited the arrival of the Brentsville team and the charter bus that would be transporting them down to the Great American Cross Country Festival on the sidewalk of the bus loop of Midlothian High School. As the regular student body filtered out at 1:45 pm, some walked by in curiousity of where the large group of Midlothian students with plenty of bags packed was going, while current team members that would not be make the trip to the team came to wish them good luck before their trip. Some kids were probably wishing they should have joined the cross country team in getiing out of school early on Thursday and missing class on Friday. Too bad for them as these Hoover-bound runners earned this trip.
Shortly after 2:00 pm, the charter bus arrives with the Brentsville team immediately getting off to take a bathroom break after having a two hour drive themselves just to travel from Nokesville, Virginia to Midlothian. The coaches and parents of the teams mingle, while the some of the girls for the rival schools share hugs and become instant chatterboxes. Meanwhile, the boys for Midlothian and Brentsville keep a distance of quiet respect for one another as the Midlothian runners load their baggage in the storage area of the bus.
As the Midlothian athletes follow the Brentsville athletes into the bus, a traffic jam occurs in the aisleway when it appears that there are more riders than seats on the bus. Seats are eventually discovered for all of the athletes, but the two head coaches in Stan Morgan at Midlothian and Rob Dulin at Brentsville opt to ride in a van of parents and coaches to give up seats to their athletes. However, the bus does have adult chaperones in more than a handful of Midlothian parents and two assistants from Brentsville and Midlothian volunteer assistant and team dad Glen Witt.
I end up finding a seat across the aisleway from Mr. Witt and next to Curtis from Brentsville. I know being four years removed from high school, I can still relate and carry on conversation at the level of today\'s high school runners and the lifestyles they live. Then again I was born in 1984 and some of these kids were conceived in the early 1990s, so my experiences are far greater and hopefully make me more mature in thought and conversation than them. Mr. Witt makes for a level of comfort on this long haul as someone that can bring back and recall some of the old memories when I use to be good friends and teammates with his eldest son Ryan at Midlothian four years ago.
The excitement level is shown in the energy and amount of conversation found amongst the runners during the first few hours of the trip. Everyone has some form of an electronic device to entertain them for the ride whether its an iPod, a portable DVD player, or PSP. Mr. Witt and I are more old school as he has brought an electronic version of Yahtzee, while I bring a CD walkman, but to my brain-deadness, no CD\'s. Its pretty apparent who has the greater personalities between the two teams by their hyperactivity at the beginning of the trip in the Brentsville boys and Midlothian girls.
Take that back. Julia Mitchell of Brentsville could definitely fit in with the personalities found among the Midlo girls as she got the girls playing leapfrog on the bus through the aisleway. A Brentsville favorite of the Midlothian girls, she also is a favorite of Coach Morgan at Midlothian as she gave him a framed picture at a later stop. The seemingly always upset about something Morgan was estastic by the gift and then made the Midlothian girls aware of the fact that at least someone cared about him.
The Brentsville guys had some good taste in comedians as I walked by and overhead them listening to both Dane Cook and Brian Regan. Maybe some of the content is not exactly PG-13 material, but it makes this politically incorrect 22 year old chuckle.
\"All of a sudden, outside, you hear a car alarm going off for forty-three minutes! I love it. I get inspired. I walk around my house. I even made lyrics for the alarm sound. Now everytime I hear it, I stand on my bed and go: Hellllloooooooooooo, I\'m a caaaaaaaaaaarrrr... gasoline makes me run, back seat! Trunk space! Helllloooooo, let\'s go for a riiiiddeee, oil is my blood! Seat belts! Radio knobs!\" - Dane Cook
Henry Melius showed he is a young man that can take charge and get it done as Brentsville\'s number two runner was everyone\'s hero in getting the DVD player to work after it was feared until we switched bus drivers in North Carolina that we may go the entire ride movie-less. We started off with our first movie of several to come in the round trip with \"Friday Night Lights\", which has some foreshadow for both teams getting to watch big-time high school football for the first time tomorrow night with nationally ranked Hoover High School taking on in-state rival Mountain Brook. While the football team in the movie finishes a close second in the state championship, the Midlothian and Brentsville cross country teams have been fortunate to earn state title rings in recent past as the Midlothian girls (VA 3A) and Brentsville boys (VA 2A) and girls (VA 2A) are defending state champions.
Both teams could pick up valuable messages in the movie. The Texas high school football team\'s season in \"Friday Night Lights\" took a turn for the worse when the athletes, coaches, and parents lost sight of the innocence and fun in the sport. When the sport and game was taken too seriously, the downfall for the team began. Both Brentsville and Midlothian have teams that high expectations and stakes in attempting to claim Nike Team Nationals berths, but in order to be accomplish their goals and not encounter the same downfall as the Odessa Permian football team, the innocence and love for the sport should never be lost or abused.
\"Stop reading the news clippings. You\'re small and you\'re going to be smaller every week. There ain\'t going to be no growth spurt between now and the first game. You\'re going to use your minds! You\'re going to play with your heart! And that is what you\'re going to use to win the State Championship.\" - Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) in \"Friday Night Lights\"
The bus stopped for dinner at a rest stop near Durham approximately 6:45 pm as the Midlothian gang got a head start on the meal as the Brentsville team put on their running shoes and jogged around the rest area for a shake out run. The Midlothian runners had gotten their run in for the day in the morning prior to school. The Brentsville team treated them to a dinner of turkey and ham sandwiches with pasta salad and fruits.
The dinner was quick as everyone knew that we were only at the halfway point of the trip. We finished up watching \"Friday Night Lights\" and the next great debate was whether to play a DVD of \"Mean Girls\" or replay video I had taken from the Brentsville Relays last Saturday in which both teams competed in. Brentsville Relays won out to the dismay of Midlothian\'s Tommy Reese. There was a good chance that every runner on the bus saw video action of themselves racing last weekend and the Brentsville gang in the back of the bus got into it as if they were back at the meet cheering and yelling at their teammates to run faster as if that would somehow change the results. Then again, I remember yelling at the TV screen at Alan Webb during his Prefontaine Classic race when he broke Jim Ryun\'s high school mile record and my brother, a non-runner, joked on me about it as he came into the room.
I tried to instigate a little bus friction when the video replayed the finish in which Brentsville\'s top runner Adam Henken pulled away from Midlothian ace Jason Witt by yelling a \"Whooooop! Whooooop!\". However, Jason just smiled with a slight sign of assurance at me as he returned back to his original seat. Very possible we could see another close race between the two on Saturday in Hoover as the #1 runners for the Southeast region\'s top two ranked teams.
As excited as some kids were to watch themselves race on video, I could have done definitely without watching the races again as not only the loud yelling by race spectators on the video gave me a headache, but I had already been through these races too many times this past week editing video clips and capturing images from the footage. Once the footage was killed, \"Coach Carter\" was the next movie up in another against all odds high school team (but in basketball), falls short of a storybook happy ending, but learns greater lessons about themselves in the loss than any victory would give them.
\"You said we\'re a team. One person struggles, we all struggle. One person triumphs, we all triumph.\" - Jason Lyle in \"Coach Carter\"
After the movie went off, the bus went into snooze mode in the final hours before arriving in Hoover after driving through Georgia and Alabama. I was one of the few bodies among the close to 60 on board that was wide awake for the entire ride as my website work demands usually leaves me up on \"zombie\" shift as I like to call it. The bus arrived at the Courtyard Marriott in Hoover around 1:00 pm Central Time as the teams benefited from the change in time zone in getting an extra hour of sleep for tomorrow.
The runners will get at least eight hours in of sleep before they head out to check out the course at 10:30 am on Friday and later will get to enjoy a pasta dinner hosted by the Mountain Brook team and see some big-time pigskin action when they see Hoover and Mountain Brook do battle on the gridiron Friday night under the lights. It will definitely be a shell shock for how big high school football can be coming from two schools that are not notorious for having strong teams with the Brenstville football team coming off consecutive 2-8 seasons and the Midlothian football team starting the 2006 season with two losses including a 41-0 season opener drubbing.
However, Midlothian and Brentsville have never needed to be inspired by their home football team or any football team to their past team glory in cross country. While cross country state championships are easily underappreciated and overlooked by many adminstrators, athletic directors, regular student body, and local media, events such as the Great American Cross Country Festival and Nike Team Nationals are filling that void in giving these athletes and teams the recognition that is due to them. Driven athletes as they are to achieve their goals, they are willing to drive great distance to meet them.