The Durango High School cross country team won a state championship this weekend, and in earning this achievement, the 55-member team travelled through some challenging terrain. Before the school year began, the runners began their season with high-altitude training on the Colorado Trail, building their stamina, strength and cohesion as a team. That foundation strengthened through the team’s competitions, where individual and group achievements led DHS cross country to a ranking of ninth in the nation after a race in Phoenix. Clearly this is a group with admirable skill, commitment and care for one another – as athletes, coaches, friends and teammates.
But after the Phoenix triumph came a moment of teenage weakness and poor decision-making. At a hotel in Sedona, some team members consumed alcohol and marijuana while others knew of the activity and kept it to themselves. One of the kids became ill; others, worried about their teammate, eventually confided their concern to the coach. Seven runners were suspended. The team as a whole and as individuals suffered a major embarrassment. Ultimately, though, the team turned the episode into an opportunity for growth, accountability and resilience. The result is a strengthened group of young people sobered by a painful experience, and redoubled in their dedication to one another.
Rare is the high school student who is not faced with difficult choices related to substance use – whether to participate in the behavior, or how to handle it when others do. It is a developmental time of pushing boundaries, honing values and learning consequences. While those runners who chose to bring and use marijuana and alcohol on the team trip were in clear violation of school rules, the Colorado High School Activities Association’s tenets, and the law, they were behaving in a way that is distressingly normal for adolescents. The individual fallout from those decisions was varyingly painful, to be sure, but the team’s response to rally around itself, acknowledge its collective mistakes and move forward with its hard-won wisdom is a wholly positive outcome.
The team was not willing to accept being defined by this incident, and worked to transcend it in several ways. First, the team gathered together to revise its mission statement and draft a team-specific code of conduct that considers both substance use and the culture that challenges kids to speak out when they observe it. The runners drafted a public apology. Individual team members wrote of their cross country experiences and relationships. And they ran – together and separately – to achieve great things both before and beyond the Sedona episode.
As these athletes and teammates worked to be accountable for and openly discuss their mistakes – as well as placing them in the larger team context – the cross country runners behaved admirably. They did not lose sight of their running-related goals, nor did they weaken their bond as a group of young people striving toward a shared mission. They did this by openly owning their missteps and working together to address them.
Durango School District 9-R should encourage these young people to share their thoughts about the cross country team – blisters and all. Theirs is a story that others can both relate to and learn from. The DHS cross country team has proven itself to be capable of many things – some great, some less so –w but most of all, the individuals on the team have shown their humanity: in striving for achievement, making mistakes, paying consequences, and moving on having learned something in the process.
