Adaptable student-athletes deserve clear skies this season

Turns out there’s some wriggle room on that “no running in the halls” rule at area high schools.

When smoky skies and poor air quality socked itself in around the Spokane area last week, football coaches called an audible and moved indoors. It wasn’t ideal, but with modern football there are always game films to analyze, position meetings to hold or weights to lift.

Monday, when the air was still unhealthy, everyone moved indoors.

That fits for most sports. It’s not ideal but you can work on something similar to soccer on a gym floor. It’s tough for holding tryouts, but it happens often enough in the spring, when late snows keep teams off the field.

But it’s a strange thing to ask of a sport that specializes in covering long, overland distances.

So administrators waived the rules about running in the corridors of learning and the teams mapped out courses – up stairs, down stairs all around the school. If something strange happens and the state meet moves inside, these kids will have the edge when it comes to running on linoleum.

Asking cross country runners to move indoors is a little like holding a jai alai match in a school custodian’s closet.

But that’s the cool thing with the kids who take up the sport of cross country running: They adapt and they overcome.

A long-time cross country coach once described the typical kid who runs cross country. They generally are better students than the average, he explained. These kids have the discipline to make long training runs while their friends and classmates are busy sleeping in or hanging out at the pool, and that discipline usually translates into better grades.

Cross country kids know what it means when you say the season is a long road. They face the long road every single day and they put in a lot of long, lonely miles before they ever get to the first day of practice.  They know you don’t win a race in the first mile – the only thing that matters is how you finish.

Cross country kids, he postured, tend to have a high level of self-esteem. That comes from occasionally having to pull over to the side of the course to throw up and frequently crossing the finish line in a state of oxygen debt.

So if anyone turned the experience into something fun, cross country kids would be the group most likely.

And if any group took a moment to appreciate the bigger picture, it’s the kids in the lightweight shorts and tank tops.

Dealing with some poor-quality air is easy compared to what kids in other parts of the state are dealing with right now. You don’t have to drive far to see towns where getting on a practice field is far, far down the list of things they worry about. Home field advantage means little when you’re worried about whether or not your home survived the inferno.

More than other years, this year’s fire season could easily stretch into the school year and could disrupt the school year, let alone disrupt fall sports.

I hope I’m wrong in saying that.

At the start of each new school year I send up a wish for everyone to make it through the season with their health intact. No concussions and definitely no repeat concussions and no torn ACLs or MCLs that require surgery to repair. If we get through the season and the worst injury anyone suffers is a high-ankle sprain, that would be good.

This year my hope is that all teams still have their home at the end of the season.