The fall athletic season began this week with tryouts starting for seven different sports across the county on Monday ahead of Aug. 23’s start to the school year. Cross country — one of just three sports, alongside volleyball and swimming, to start their seasons last November — is slated to get up and running over the next two weeks, with programs like Woods Charter and Northwood looking to make big returns to the state meets this year.
Woods Charter was one of the top programs in the county last season, sending five runners from the women’s team to the 1A NCHSAA State Championships in Kernersville in January, finishing in sixth place as a team with freshman Ellie Poitras (4th place, 20:16.03) leading the way.
This week, in the second edition of The Clipboard — a series featuring coaches and sports figures from across Chatham — we speak with Karen Hawkins, second-year head coach of the Wolves, who’s in the midst of her first real offseason with the team this summer.
Hawkins has worked as a cross country coach for the last eight years, including a three-year stint at Leesville Road High School in Raleigh as the head women's coach, followed by a four-year stay as an assistant coach at Panther Creek High School in Cary. In 2020, she joined the Wolves as the head coach for men’s and women’s cross country, where she helped lead the women’s team to a state meet appearance.
KAREN HAWKINS: For me, the commitment from the students, the runners, I was most proud of because it was so unpredictable and there were constant changes and there was constant confusion about when will we begin practice, when will the season begin, when will the first week be, what will that look like? And then we did have to make adjustments sometimes due to contact tracing, or other challenges that a lot of teams faced due to COVID. The fact that they stuck with it and gave it their best, to me, that was the most inspiring, too, because it wasn’t like a typical season.
One of the things that I’m normally used to doing is pasta dinners or team celebrations that are just team activities that we felt were unsafe to do, so it was pretty much strictly coming to practice, keeping our distance and going to meets. There was little camaraderie and just the general fun that comes with a normal season and, again, it showed that they were committed. I think they found a positive in all that, though. I think they saw the silver lining despite it being unusual. They rallied around each other and were really supportive of each other. I think, for me, that was most exceptional on their part.
The girls have told me that they want to go back to states; they enjoyed that experience and I think that’s one thing that we’re harping on this year. Let’s keep this going and try to make it back and maybe try to improve upon our performance and crack into the top five this year. It requires our runners to be there as much as possible and to push each other. It’s hard to run by yourself, it’s not as much fun, so being together helps us all and helped us get pretty far last year. I’m hopeful that message is still in their mind but I’ll try to remind them of that as much as possible.
We haven’t talked much about the boys yet, but that was because — not to go too much into detail — we had a lot of freak injuries — broken collarbones, knee issues, a number of things that were just due to bad luck — and then we also had a few that had been in contact with someone with COVID last year, so the day before the meet they would find out and we, of course, couldn’t have them race, so that was really disappointing for them. I’m hopeful this year we’ll have a full squad and they can also join the girls at the state meet.
I’m hopeful that this year we can have a plan that we can stick with. We began summer practices last year in June, just like we did this year, with the hope that we would have the season starting in August, but that was pushed back to November, so we had to stop what we were doing, take some time off and then come back. I’m hopeful this year that we can — since we started in mid-June — that we can keep building upon this and not have the stop-start. It’s possible that could happen for other reasons, but I’m hopeful that we can have the consistency of a plan.
We also have some meets that we can target that we have on the schedule, as well, that we weren’t sure about last year, so I think that comes with a little bit more excitement, maybe, because last year it was hard to get excited because you were wondering, well, when is it going to end? Is it going to continue? So I think the excitement is a little bit greater from what I can tell. We’re getting our runs in about four or five times a week, we meet out at Woods, so it’s mostly just building up mileage, just longer, what I call conversational-paced runs, where they’re not out of breath, but they’re getting their longer runs in. Then we’ll start to do some faster stuff here soon.
I’m very excited to see all of them return and build upon last year, so I definitely want to see that for sure, but one that comes to mind first might be Wiley Sikes because he didn’t have a chance to finish his season last year. He was building his way and had to stop right when he was kind of getting some momentum, so I’m really looking forward to seeing him and how far he can take his season. He’ll be a junior and I do think he’ll be very competitive in the region and hopefully at the state meet, if he makes it.
On the girls side, Ellie Poitras, she finished first in the second section — they had two sections last year at states — so she won that section, but as well as she ran, I think she has a lot more in her. I also think, as she’s a year older, she can compete with some of the girls that she was not able to race against last year in the second section. She’s been putting in some good work and she ran track this past outdoor spring season and did very well there, so she’s coming off of a strong freshman year and I think her sophomore year will be even better. She’s very talented, but she works extremely hard and she’s very competitive. I’ve personally never seen her do anything less than what I’d consider her best, so that’s something that’s also good for our team.
We have a lot of runners like that, that give it their all and help everyone around them. I’d also say Maddie Sparrow on the girls side, she’s a rising junior, I think she has a lot of growth to show this year. She was our No. 2 runner consistently last year. We also have returned Chloe Richard, she’s like a lot of our girls, they’re multi-sport athletes, so she plays soccer pretty heavily but yet she finds the time to come out for the cross country team and I think she would agree that it’s helping her soccer, but at the same time, it’s something that I think she’s learning to enjoy.
And there are so many boys to name that just had their season cut short. Wiley Sikes to Collin Thompson, who’s going to be a rising junior, that I’m looking forward to seeing how he does. And then Ethan Green, he’s a rising sophomore, he had a really good end to his year and really showed a lot of leadership as a freshman. When we did lose a lot of our boys, he was a consistent hard worker and we really saw a lot of growth at the end of the year, so I think keeping him healthy, we can see even more leadership and contributions to the team.
There’s a lot of things. Our first week of tryouts, we tend to do a mile time trial, so — even though it’s a lot shorter distance than what we normally do — I think it’s a fun way for the kids to do something fast and give me insight into their fitness. And then the first meet we have on Aug. 21 is a 3K, so not quite a 5K, but I also look forward to those 3Ks because it’s kind of a beginning part of racing, but it’s a short enough distance that, as they’re growing in their endurance and their aerobic ability, they can still have fun with it. Plus, it’s still warm, so shorter is often better until it cools off a little bit. So I’m looking forward to that meet on the 21st, it’s at Rolesville High School and it’s actually a new event. That’s where the fun happens is at the races, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the kids do there.