QA₂ Max: Bill Aris, Fayetteville-Manlius HS (NY) – National Girls XC Coach of the Year

On the heels of his girls’ team’s eighth national title in nine years, Bill Aris was named National Girls Cross Country Coach of the Year by the USTFCCCA. He spoke on the phone with me a day after finding out about the award. We didn’t cover his Stotan coaching philosophy or the history of his teams—that’s been extensively covered elsewhere—but we did talk about the co-ed nature of his program, the particularly special qualities of this year’s team(s), and, unprompted, the infamous critique that Fayetteville-Manlius runners are burned out by the time that they get to college.    

Q: I was warned that you were inclined to make sure your whole program, and not just your girls team—who this award is for—got recognition.

A: I do that feel that way, and it’s no way any resentment towards the winner of the boys award. Bill [Miles] is a great coach and a great man. My point is completely separate from that—from the perspective of me winning a girls award, my program is co-ed, and it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the two, especially this year. They’re inseparable.

Having said that, I understand that the award is for the Girls Coach of the Year. But you’ll hopefully understand that any questions you ask me, I’m going to answer them in the context of both teams together.

Q: Sure. I’ve followed your program for a while, and I know you’ve had lots of elite girls who would work out with the boys—

A: They’re athletes. I don’t see them as boys or girls. They might be male athletes or female athletes, but at our practice, they’re athletes. That’s the perspective that I’ve always approached it from.

The success of both teams has been interdependent over the years.  If you took away the girls’ success over the years [ed: Eight national titles in the last nine years], the boys would be recognized as a national powerhouse. But due to the girls’ incredible success, sometimes that gets overlooked. So if I have any sensitivity, it’s for the boys’ achievements this year being superhuman.

Any award I ever receive as a coach, I always pass on to the kids.  They’re the ones putting in the work. I might be putting in the long man-hours and guiding them, but the players have to play, no matter what a coach does. That’s why I feel very passionate about the kids of both genders whenever an award comes up.

Q: You mentioned that the award always goes to the kids. With so many teams that have been award-worthy in the last decade, what about this particular group stuck in your brain?

A: These kids were the most mutually respectful—I’ve had lots of great groups of kids over the years I’ve coached, but this group, what distinguished them as special and unique is their absolute complete respect in each other, both genders working as athletes together.

The boys’ team was truly special. They referred to themselves as a band of brothers, and they conducted themselves that way. They were like a family. Of course I try to cultivate that environment in practice, but that family extended beyond the boys to the girls.

The boys were as excited and proud of the girls’ success as they were of their own, and in turn, the girls felt exactly the same way about the boys’ success.

If you look at pictures from [nationals], you’d see the kids together, arm-in-arm, up on the podium with the coaches.  They were proud of each other.  I think the girls, while the boys were running [right after the girls had captured a national championship], were more concerned with the boys’ success than their own.  They ran their race, they won, and then they were preoccupied with the boys race right away.

It wouldn’t have felt the same if both teams didn’t win, and both teams were just as ecstatic for each other as they were for themselves.

Q: Is it fair to paint a picture that while the girls were allegedly tired and cooling down, they were sprinting around the course rooting for the boys?

A: That’s 100% accurate. And I’ll flip it around the other way.  The boys—we have a certain discipline in our program—when the girls were racing, I had to tell the boys “Our mindset is that there’s only one race today, and that’s yours. The girls will take care of themselves.”  Well, with all respect to them, I watched them warming up, and they had more than one eye on the girls race while they were warming up.

I said to them that I appreciated them cheering for the girls, and I know the girls feel that way too. But boys: in an hour, you have a race to run!

That goes back to the question you asked me; that’s what was so special about this year.

Q: Your girls didn’t even have anyone in the top 40 at nationals.

A: We had five girls with a twelve-second compression. Our fifth girl was one of our top two or three the whole season, and I can’t say she had a bad day. But if she was where she normally was, we would have had a four-second compression one through five.

They had a group to distinguish them from past years’ teams.  In this run of state and national championships, there’s been a variety of types of ways we’ve won.  We’ve won with front-running killers that had good-but-not-great runners backing them up; we’ve won with teams that had average kids with one or two stepping up; this year, we didn’t have one kid in the front.

But we had a pack that came together like one fist.  This was unique in that we didn’t have that front-running firepower, but we knew that all season. This was going to be an average group of girls that was going to step up and do above-average things. And that’s what they did.

What made this team special is that they worked together and they developed and peaked together.  And they did it with relative anonymity without that superstar up front.  That might be their most special quality: five girls doing incredible things just be sticking together and working hard.

Q: Your philosophy has been pretty widely disseminated; it’s not like you guys do any secret workouts. Well, I think.

A: No, you’re right.  I get that question all the time. Many people get frustrated when I tell them that there are no secrets.

It would be like reinventing the wheel! Arthur Lydiard, Percy Cerutty, and a few others pretty much defined it many years ago, and all we’ve done is adjust and modify. I’ve certainly done things from a coaching perspective that have been unique to my team, but it’s all based on applying those original tried and true principles.

Now, it’s not like “There’s a standard approach that I use, and that’s it.” I build the training regimen around the kids that I have.

The girls this year were coached differently than other teams that I’ve had.  In some years, one or two of our best girls would work out with the boys because they could run with the top seven.  It was a different dynamic this year.

In some ways, I say this part out of habit.  They say “Oh, Aris runs them into the ground with mileage.”

It’s not that way. It’s just not that way.  We run solid mileage, but at the same time, our training volumes are based on individual needs.  I’ve had ninth-grade girls running 25 miles a week, and I’ve had senior boys running 75, and everything in between.  It’s all based on what the kid needs in order to be successful at that point in their running career. It’s quite different than how the public might try to explain it.  It just doesn’t work that way.

Q: I think my stance on this—the same criticism came to York on the boys side when they were in their heyday—

A: And before us in New York state, Saratoga! You know? Yes, York is a high mileage program, and Joe Newton has come out and said that. There’s nothing wrong with high mileage if it’s done properly.  If it’s high mileage and incredibly high intensity, yeah, you’re going to wind up burning them out and ruining kids.  And that couldn’t be farther from what we do.

Q: Yeah, my view on it is that the kids from the famous programs aren’t burned out when they get to college.  These kids just have such an amazing, intense experience high school that their college team just isn’t as emotionally stimulating for them.

A: “Emotionally stimulating” is the right phrase.  Most college programs—it’s really difficult at the NCAA level to recapture what these kids can get in high school, with how they develop together and grow up together.  When they get to college, it becomes far more impersonal, far more businesslike.

I think the best programs cultivate that selfless team approach.  But at a lot of places, it’s becomes “OK, you’re really good, that’s why you’re here. Now go out and be good while I go recruit next year’s class.” You know? That’s the job of a college coach—bring in good kids and give them a standard training plan that they can be good on.

A few programs do it a little bit differently than that, and they’re the ones that I admire.

Q: I agree with that.  Can you talk about the day in Portland when you guys realized you had won both, and what that experience was like for everyone who was there?

A: First off, Nike did a magnificent job with the new course.  It was a fair course, and contrary to reports of it being muddy, only the spectator areas were muddy.  The course itself was in beautiful shape.

I went into the day with a pretty good state of peace and calm.  I honestly felt more confidence with the boys team than I did with the girls; certainly, I went in believing that winning both was a doable thing.

Both teams executed beautifully.  Our teams have been based on selflessness over the years. So while we’ve had individual leaders, most of the time, they’re interchangeable.  Our girls team this year was a great example of that.

It was such a special day. We were ecstatic about the girls winning.  But in my mind, and in the girls’ minds, as the awards are going on, we’re all thinking about the boys race!  So on one hand, “great, we did it again, we came back after losing last year,” but we got right off the podium and bang, straight to the boys race. And everyone was invested in that.