I didn’t do sports growing up. I’m not sure exactly how or when I learned the meaning of the term “team”, though at some point I must have, because I now have a tremendous appreciation for the team that I am a part of – the Architecture Group in the EMC CTO office. Not sports, but a fabulous experience nonetheless. But I mention this only to establish that I do understand the concept.

This post is about the team that is the Dos Pueblos Chargers Cross Country team. Our son is a sophomore this year, but it is only his first year on the CC team – last fall he played freshman football, but then some time during the track and field season in the spring he decided to run year around. So we are learning with him, and while today was the first meet of the season, even before today we were getting a strong sense of the nuance of the sport. Sure, for the most part, each athlete is running independently, but, take for example this meet, there were only two individual awards, the fastest boy and the fastest girl, and there were 19 team awards. Most of the team awards are scored by taking the sum the top finishers, usually the top five, either by time or by place, and the lowest score wins. Every single place is meaningful, every second counts.

So, this meet. In this meet the races ran by age – there were separate races for freshman, sophomore, junior and senior levels. My son’s team took 21 boys to this meet where more than 70 teams competed. The seniors ran first, then the freshmen, then juniors and finally, sophomores – the races were about an hour apart. During the last team meeting last night, after Coach had explained that each of the non-senior groups could sleep-in later, one of the sophomores, that is one of the boys who wouldn’t run until after 11am and could hence sleep 3 hours later than the seniors, spoke up and said that he thought everyone should be there for the senior’s race. Everyone agreed.

So, today. Everyone is there for the start of the senior’s race, a race that set the tone. Our top guy finished first, setting a new course record; and every other of our seniors set a PR, finishing 4 in the top 25 (of roughly 200). Hovering around the team tent immediately thereafter virtually all that I heard was the seniors describing the conditions of the course in detail, for the benefit of the teammates that would follow them. “Hey Wes, listen up, when you go around that last turn over by the beach, be really careful because the footing is really loose.” It goes without saying that every athlete was there for every race in which their teammates ran.

So, the last race. By this time it was fairly late in the day (ok, fairly late in the morning, but it already felt like a whole day). We have a really strong sophomore team, lead by a wicked fast guy who, from our perspective, was heavily favored to win the race. And sure enough, at the 2 mile mark he had almost a 10 second lead over #2. He was looking like a sure win. What he said when he passed us at that two mile mark, with one mile to go, brought tears to my eyes. With a sparkle in his eyes he said, “we are 1, 2, 3!” He was as excited about his teammates positions as he was about his own. Whoah.

My son knows at 15 what I didn’t get until I was in my 40s.