Yes, we have our first MVTF competitions this week…but we are also only six months away from our first practice of the 2026 cross-country season! Time does, as the saying goes, fly. And distance running is a year around venture.
So…your coaches have already been hard at work planning the upcoming MVXC season. We have meets picked out, bus transportation booked, hotels reserved for travel meets, summer running shirts ordered…and we wanted to share this with you, the runner. And on Monday, March 2 at lunchtime, we held a 2026 Season Reveal party!
Attached is both the presentation from the season reveal and a copy of the preliminary schedule. Many things could happen to change the schedule–in that amount of time, a meet director could change a date or for that matter cancel an event. But honestly, this schedule feels pretty solid, so we encourage you to put these dates in your calendar–and start planning pesky things like SAT tests and other extracurriculars around MVXC :).
Parents, we hope this helps you plan for your athlete’s next season, regarding both schedule and budget. The schedule issues are clear; the the extent you can help plan trips, classes, tests, and so on around our team commitments, that will help your athlete be dedicated, consistent, and successful. We also tried to give you a preliminary idea of the planned team budget. As you can imagine, trying to provide an elite athletic experience to everyone, not only the top runners on a team, is not inexpensive, and a public school athletic program gets limited funding from the school. In the preliminary schedule attachment below, we try to give you an idea of our anticipated costs and as we did last year, I will provide a detailed line-by-line budget at the parent meeting in August. I am committed to transparency about our team budget and I want you to know where your contribution goes (it does not go to coaches’ salaries!).
We hope you see how much planning we have put into making this season rewarding for everyone who is a part of MVXC–athletes for sure, but also coaches, parents, and friends of the program. MVXC is a competitive team, but it is also part of a journey. George Sheehan tells us that the competition is not against the other people in the race, the real competition is against the little voice in our head that wants us to quit. That is why I think distance running is so much like life…there is always someone faster, or taller, or richer, or better at math, or more creative, if you keep seeking out bigger and better challenges. But the goal is not so much to be the fastest or the best, the goal should be to strive to be the best we can be and to get the most possible out of our innate talents–in running, and all the things that help us have happy, successful, productive, and rich lives.
This process of trying to be the best we can be is hard, and Angela Duckworth has something to say about that. Angela says that if you situate yourself well, you can make hard things a little (or a lot) easier. And that is one of the goals of having a strong distance running program–to provide you with wonderful teammates, supportive friends, capable coaches and mentors, and a fun and challenging environment that makes the hard work of distance running something that you want to do for four years. We want to make this challenging commitment a little bit easier. If you have the experience of a long-term commitment now, perhaps that will help you in college, your profession, and your personal life when you commit to other long-term goals.
Thank you all for being part of this journey with us!
And please tell your friends…there is always room for more committed, positive people.
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