Bill Aris, 60, started coaching at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, 12 miles east of Syracuse, New York, in 1992, and over the years, his duties kept growing. He became the girls head coach in 1998, and in 2004, the same year the Nike Cross Nationals (NXN) high school championships began, Aris took over as head coach of the boys team. His teams have had unmatched consistency at the national level, and last fall the boys and girls squads won NXN titles. The girls are A Part of Hearst Digital Media heading into Saturday's NXN race in Portland, Oregon.
Ask the Coaches: Foamy Sweat, basketball, lacrosse, and pickup games of hockey. I could play schoolyard sports all day and still go running without tiring. I went out for freshman track and ran the 800. But I did not enjoy all the interval training on the track, typical of that era. After that season, I continued running on my own.
Teammates tried to get me to come out for cross country, but I didn’t want any part of it.
I got caught up in the 1970s running boom and was inspired by watching Lasse Virén win the 5,000 and 10,000 in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics. I went on to run a dozen marathons. In 1991, I ran my PR of 2:43:12 at Boston.
Prior to coaching, my main job from 1980 to 1992 was real-estate manager for a large corporation in the Syracuse area. Dealing with a range of people, honing communication skills, and having to negotiate to satisfy different needs would eventually serve me well in coaching. I think I got to know what made people tick.
My company downsized in 1992, and I was let go. We had two children by then, and my wife was a registered nurse. I decided to offer my services at the high school as both a teacher’s aide and assistant coach.
In the years leading up to 2004, I was looking for fresh ideas. I found what I was looking for in the Stotan concepts of the Australian coach Percy Cerutty, who developed Herb Elliott and many other all-time greats. The purity of Cerutty’s approach appealed to me. His emphasis on strength-building, running on sand hills, and nutrition and training as a lifestyle all clicked with my own thoughts.
I read and studied every book on Cerutty I could find. Cerutty’s ideas were so old-school and, considering our culture today, so passé, that they felt new and audacious. The pure Stotan philosophy of a “stoic” and “spartan” value system could be just what high school runners needed.
In August 2004, leading into the cross-country season, I organized a weeklong Stotan camp for our top eight F-M boys at the Adirondacks summer home of one of the boy’s parents. Our camp was voluntary and free. All the families agreed to it. The only requirement was that the parents purchase the week’s food.
A typical Stotan day at the camp went like this: three runs, including long trail runs, hills, and tempo hill circuits, totaling 10 miles and up; mind-body discussions; nutritious meals; jumping in the lake after runs like Cerutty’s athletes did in the ocean in Australia.
The experiment worked. At the end of the week, I felt the boys had learned many new ideas that they would hold dear to their hearts. They were now different.
Our Stotan attributes hit the high school cross-country community with a jolt that fall season of 2004. At the Manhattan Invitational at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, the boys placed first through fifth for a sweep in their varsity race against national power Christian Brothers Academy of New Jersey.
By being selfless, thinking of performing for others—that is, your teammates—you free yourself of the constraints of having to perform only for yourself.
Running in the Cold Today, a senior, Olivia Ryan, made the comment on camera that she did not know her PR on any cross-country course. That was a telling remark.
We do comprehensive resistance work, including squats, dead lifts, power cleans, and presses, year-round. I do the same work as the athletes. For my 60th birthday, I did a 365-pound dead lift.
Our program rarely has stars. My whole process is attempting to take average runners and make them above average, and taking above-average runners and trying to make them great. But it’s not really making them; it’s sharing with the athletes the pursuit of excellence.
Marc Bloom’s high school cross-country rankings have played an influential role in the sport for more than 20 years and led to the creation of many major events, including Nike Cross Nationals and the Great American Cross Country Festival. He published his cross-country journal, Harrier, for more than two decades.
