F-M's veterans still get 'chills' thinking of Nike Cross Nationals

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Jillian Fanning got the message from Bill Aris directly, the night before Thanksgiving.

Do you think you can come in and meet the team at 7:30 a.m. at the YMCA? 

"Oh my gosh, 7:30," Fanning remembers thinking. "But, yes, they need me. Bill called me and I felt honored. I said 'Yes' right away."

Every Thanksgiving morning, Aris, the Fayetteville-Manlius NY cross country coach, meets with his team before the athletes go their separate ways to spend the holiday with their families. 

The F-M runners get a chance to see and hear from the program's previous champions two days before the Nike Cross Regional New York meet, and 10 days out from the NXN finals in Portland.

"The current kids love it, the veterans love it. I love it because I get to re-connect with them," Aris said. 

Fanning, who was on four championship teams from 2009-12 was not alone. Molly Malone, who was on four championship teams from 2006-09, was there. 

The only five-time champion in NXN history, Courtney Chapman (2006-10), showed up with her boyfriend, Villanova's 2016 NCAA Cross Country champion, Patrick Tiernan. 

They were among a half dozen graduates who showed up on Thanksgiving morning. 

As Aris prepares his teams to go after the things that he has taught them to believe they can achieve, he shows them the runners who came before and did it with the same training on the same running paths east of Syracuse, N.Y.

The alums are thrilled to come back and orbit the energy that once consumed them at this time of year.

"It brought me chills and excitement all over again," Fanning said. "We did a pretty good job of explaining that to the rest of the team and telling them: 'This is your time that you've been leading up to.'"

Only once in the past 12 years has another high school girls cross country team beaten Fayetteville-Manlius at Nike Cross Nationals. Wayzata of Minnesota broke the streak in 2013 -- by 12 points. 

On Saturday, with a lineup that did most of the damage in last year's victory, the Manlius XC girls will try to win their 11th title.

The annual outcome of the girls race at NXN may seem like a broken record, the same tune playing over and over. 

Aris has never treated it like that. He calls every new season a brand new opportunity, gets the committed athletes on his team to buy in to his training plan and asks them to listen closely to what he has to tell them: Work together. Believe in one another. Reach the next goal as a unit. Be part of the Stotan (a mix of Stoic and Spartan) machine.

Chapman has an MBA from Syracuse and works for a business management consulting company, Ernst & Young, in a high rise building adjacent to Times Square in New York City. 

She hasn't been to Portland since she and her teammates won the 2010 national championship, but the memories of her five visits to Nike and the meet haven't faded. 

"Year after year, I got better at knowing how to prepare for the race," Chapman said. "Every time (we went) if felt like we were a family. We were always together."

Chapman recalls the group coming back to the hotel after a jog and the entire group camping out in one hotel room to watch TV. 

"One room, and there were eight of us on two full-size beds and we all fell asleep," she said. "I remember waking up and being like, 'What?!' But we just enjoyed being together as a team."

They knew they were in a bubble created by Aris to filter out as many distractions as possible in the 72 hours before the race. He found spaces for them to hang out, as a team, or with family, and to relax. 

"One thing I wish I did more was take a step back and look around and appreciate it," Chapman said. "We went out (to Portland) very much with the objective to get it done. And after the race I'd think 'That was really cool that we just did that.' And then all of a sudden it's gone. I didn't slow down my mentality."

That, in a nutshell, was the message Chapman aimed to deliver to this year's F-M teams. Relax. Pause. Look around. Soak it in. Live in the moment. 

The F-M alums said it goes by too fast. They are in their mid-20s now. Their lives have progressed. They are into grad school and jobs and relationships and real life. 

And they miss the feeling they had on the nation's No. 1 team of cross country killers in Portland. 

"It's kind of crazy how long it's been, but how much of an impact it still has on me," said Malone, a grad student at Boston University and a graphic designer for Tracksmith.

"I miss the feeling of being there with the purpose (of winning) and seeing my team next to the other teams that were playing around," Malone added. "I remember the (webcast) camera would pan past the teams on the starting line and (other teams) would jump and wave and scream at the camera. And it would get to us and we wouldn't flinch. Eyes on the prize. One goal.

"You felt like a bad-ass when you knew that your training was better than everyone else's on the starting line, and you knew that you were stronger than anyone else." 

Year after year, the F-M girls learned what to expect and that knowledge has been handed down from one class to the next. 

Throughout those early years, the girls from Manlius XC wore a variety of uniform color combinations at the championship race at Portland Meadows. 

"My personal favorite -- well, my freshman year we wore gold and white -- but sophomore year it was gold and black. That was my favorite," Fanning said. "White and gold had an angelic look to it. I liked the black. I felt like an absolute killer when I put it on."

Sophomore year. That's the one (2010) when Fayetteville-Manlius went 2-4-6 in the overall scoring with Christie Rutledge, Katie Sischo and Fanning, putting up a meet-record score of 23 points. 

Even by that point, F-M's legacy at NXN was set in cement. But seven years later it has barely skipped a beat.

Fanning, a Syracuse grad student after running for Providence, said she loved being there last week on Thanksgiving morning to share and reminisce and offer advice. 

She liked what she saw in the kids that were listening in the lobby of the Fayetteville YMCA.

"It's a relatively young team," Fanning said. "I saw myself in some of the girls. I have gone back to the school quite a few times and seen them a bit over the summer, so I'm familiar with them.

"I see the same type of mentality: Stotan killer face."