Personal Narrative: My Liberty High School Cross Country Team

In life, even though we are told not to do so, a lot of us “count our chickens before they hatch”. We make assumptions on things before they happen because we believe that if something seems so likely, it will happen. Well, that is what my Liberty High School cross country team did my sophomore year. Going into the year, we not only knew we were going to be strong, we thought other teams were going to be weak. The top teams from the state finals the previous year had all lost most of their key pieces. In our minds, the state title was already won. Early season success led us to believe our prediction would come true. Meet after meet led to one win after another. We looked unstoppable. But things quickly changed later in the season when one of our better runners had to sit out for an extended period of time with a pulled hip flexor. At first we didn’t think it would affect us

Despite the newspapers and previews saying we would not contend for the state title that year, I kept in my head that anything could happen. Going into the year I told our team “lets focus on what we can do to improve, and not worry about anyone else”. At the beginning, other teams were too strong for our inexperienced runners to compete with, but we didn’t change the focus. Practice after practice, I made sure we were doing everything we could to be at our best for the end of the year. I didn’t care what other teams were doing because we had no control over that. The only thing we could control was what we were doing to improve as a team. Our last regular season meet before championship season is where I first saw that mentality pay off. We had won our first invitational, and that sparked the belief in all of us that we had a shot for a state title. But it was after regionals that we began to believe we should prepare to win. A regional title gave us the exact confidence boost we needed going into the state