Leadership
Last year I joined the cross-country team over in Adel. I would be on Van Meters team but it is to small to have a good team. Last year I team was a little short of being good at all. We weren’t terrible but we were bad. We never won a meet, we never got top 3, I don’t think we ever even got top 6. But that is because we had no leadership.
A lot of people think of cross-country as a individual sport. People just want to see their child succeed, and that was the case last year. The Van Meter parents cheered for the Van Meter runners and the Adel parents Cheered on the Adel runners. But this year now that we have a new coach and 2 new captains we have changed this team drastically.
This year with Collin O’Leary and myself as the co-captains, I believe that we have helped turn this Adel cross-country program into the ADM-VM cross-country team. With all the Van Meter runners who go to Adel, I would think it would be harder to fit in and get along but we do a great job of it.
The morals of this team have changed for the better not the worse. Last season we didn’t fight to win we fought to beat the other kid on the Adel team and once we did that we didn’t go after the kid that’s winning the race. But this year new competition new goals and every single runner that is on the varsity squad has beat the time that the best runner got last year. This year we are a team….. not a program.