COLUMBIA – Connie Grant shakes his head when he talks about running cross-country at Rock Hill some 40 years ago in Converse tennis shoes.
Photo right: David Adams (left) and Eastside coach and Berea alumnus Ed Boehmke (right)
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Bob Jenkins chuckles when also recalling that during that time the coaches would hand out three-by-five cards as runners crossed the finish line and they would write down their times and clip the cards to a coat hanger.
Grant and Jenkins, along with other former cross-country runners and coaches from South Carolina this week shared their thoughts with scrunners.com on how their sport has changed over the years, ahead of this weekend’s SCTCCCA Coaches Classic, the first major high school meet of the young cross-country season.
Grant, who competed at Rock Hill and then coached the sport for many years, said he got hooked on cross country in the late 60s and early 70s for the same reasons others did then: “I just enjoyed running. I was running way before running was cool.”
Like many at that time, Grant ran cross-country to help him improve at his main sport, football. He would train for cross-country meets by running home from school following football practice.
“Believe it or not, I was an offensive lineman on the football team,” Grant said. “I wasn’t a big offensive lineman, and I wasn’t a small cross-country runner. I was probably somewhere in-between.”
Looking back, Grant now realizes how “ridiculous” that training method was, but “that’s the way we did things back then.
Under Jenkins’ leadership, the cross-country team “came together” during Grant’s senior year, setting cross-country marks at Rock Hill that still stand today. He lettered in cross-country that year, though he had to talk his girlfriend into sewing the letters “CC” on his football letter, which confused some of his friends.
“They would come up and ask me, ‘I thought your last name was Grant?’ ”
Grant went on to letter at Clemson before returning to the high school coaching ranks as a football coach at Northwestern.
“I was a football coach, but I did as much as I could with the cross-country team on the weekends.”
Recently retired from coaching, Grant is now a guidance counselor at Rock Hill but he still follows cross-country.
Jenkins, who first coached cross-country in the state at Carlisle Military School in Bamberg during the 60s, remembers his teams running a two-mile course early on, before extending it to 2.5 miles and finally the 5,000-meter courses run today. The sport was strictly for boys in its early years and stayed that way until Title IX became law in the early 70s.
“The growth in the sport as been enormous, and the women have improved immensely. Their abilities have been astounding,” he said, noting that the competitive gap has narrowed between boys and girls in cross-country.
“Men still have better times than women, but the gap has closed,” Jenkins said.
Libby Holeman-Love, who coached at South Pointe High and also ran for Jenkins at Northwestern High in Rock Hill, said that while Title IX, the 1972 law that really opened the door to women in high school and college athletics, has played a key role in the growth and popularity of cross-country, especially for women, she said the Internet has also been a factor.
“There’s more exposure now than there was even when I started running competitively in the eighties,” she said.
She said girls who would get into the sport as a way of conditioning their bodies for other sports, learned that they could succeed at cross-country.
Holeman-Love’s husband, Jack, coaches cross-country and track at Northwestern, and their daughter, Sydney, runs on the cross-country team as a sixth-grader at York Preparatory Academy. She was all-state during each of her four years at Northwestern High, completing 5,000 meters in the neighborhood of 19:40.
“Now, the girls are flying through the course. It’s amazing,” she said.
The popularity of the sport is reflected in the numbers of high school males and females who come out each summer. Grant said he remembers being part of a team of about a dozen 40 years ago at Rock Hill. This year, close to 70 runners are on the team.
This weekend’s Coaches Classic is expected to attract 3,000 competitors, compared with a little over 100 who ran in the early days of the meet, Jenkins said.
And, as Holeman-Love pointed out, the runners – both male and female – continue to get stronger and faster, a change that the coaches agree is a direct consequence of better training, facilities and equipment.
“In the early 70s, my mindset was to run more miles to get better,” Grant said. But, we’ve learned that that’s not necessarily so. You need speed, agility, weight-bearing training, non-weight bearing training, all of those things to make an improvement.”
Grant thinks the change in cross-country training seemed to take hold with the success and popularity of running icons, including Bill Rogers, George Sheehan, and others, plus the fitness boom of the 1980s.
The increased interest in fitness fed the improvement in equipment across athletics, including cross-country, he said.
“When I started running, we used PF Flyers and Converse tennis shoes, and it wasn’t until my senior year at Rock Hill running track that I got my first pair of Adidas running flats.”
David Adams, who ran cross-country and track at Hilton Head High in the mid 90s and holds the state record (14:37) in the sport, told scrunners.com weight training helped in advancing his career.
“For the first 4 years of my running career we were in the weight room either very seldom or never,” Adams said. “The times that I can remember spending time in the weight room, our time was mostly spent working out our legs using a leg press machine and doing leg curls.
“During my junior year I began working with a few new coaches in the mornings before school. My weight workouts increased and mainly focused on building my upper body and core strength,” Adams said. Soon I was bench-pressing 40-50 pounds over my body weight, doing 60-plus dips without stopping. For the first time I had the ability to win races that came down to the wire.
Adams said the upper body weight training, along with the endurance work of the cross country season helped him during track season.
“Because of the weight room, I was able to have the speed of a 400 meter runner and the endurance of a 5K runner at the same time.”
Looking ahead, Grant believes cross-country will benefit from what he expects will be an increase in the number of young people who competed at the high school and college level who return to the sport as coaches.
He said the sport will attract more runners who have been trained specifically in cross-country, and who are “hungry” for the knowledge of cross-country and running, as opposed to the old practice of using a football coach to oversee the sport.
“Now we’re getting people who know cross-country, who know running, who know injury, who know repetition. We have the experience in the coaching ranks that we may not have had years ago,” Grant said.
Jenkins said a preview of the sports’ future will be displayed this weekend when the Coaches Classic uses chips embedded in each athlete’s running bib to record their times.
“We would hand out cards to the runners as they crossed the finish line, and put them on coat hangers. Now, we’re using chips that can measure time down to a thousandth of a second.”
Jenkins, who is a member of the SCTCCCA Hall of Fame and one of the cross-country’s founding members, said the level of competition will only get better in the years ahead.
“What we started is something that is absolutely amazing,” Jenkins said. Everyone who has participated either directly or indirectly in the sport has continued to “raise the bar.”
Photos provided