The Blue Valley Southwest campus is equipped with facilities for athletes: turf fields, a newly resurfaced tennis courts, a pool, baseball fields and a massive gym. There is a place for almost every sport, but the one thing that’s missing is somewhere for the cross country team to train. The campus may not have a five-mile-long trail for the team to run, but they are making do. Almost every day, the team piles into the school vans with their backpacks, their Gatorade jugs and their running shoes to travel to parks with trails and terrain perfect for cross country.
It may not seem worth it to travel to a different place to run when the Southwest campus has a track and sidewalks, but the runners find benefits from it.
“[Running in other places] gets us used to running hills and other terrain,” sophomore Brady Wagner said. “Rather than running on a flat surface.”
The team alternates between Heritage and Black Bob Park and a course on 141st and Pflumm. Running the trails around the lakes and on hills make for great training tools. Aside from the training benefits, traveling to different locations provides a change in scenery.
“You get to see new things,” Wagner said. “And it’s not like running laps over and over again.”
Other schools have designated training areas that are considered their ‘home turf’. With the neighboring high schools frequenting certain parks and neighborhoods, Southwest seems to be stepping on toes everywhere they go.
“It’s a headache” senior Jared Heinzerling said. “Unless we intrude on their practice areas, we are confined to the radius of our campus.”
While most runners feel as though they are trapped with nowhere to run some feel the surrounding schools are to blame.
“If anything, I think that West is intruding on our space,” junior Addie Dickens said. “We deserve to train too, and we work just as hard as they do.”
Until the problem is dealt with, the cross country team will continue to travel to various parks around the Blue Valley area.
“It’d be nice if we had some trails within walking or running distance of [the school]” assistant coach Aaron Ballew said. “But we are working with what we have.”
