For parents with children and teens running laps around the house, there is a local running club — with a new nonprofit status — to help them get that energy out.
The Greater Williamsburg Distance Running Club is a distance-running group for students in third to eighth grade. The group, which began in 2014 and meets weekly, was recently granted nonprofit status.
The club’s new status will help it gain donations and grow, said running club coach Mark Tompkins.
“A lot of kids don’t think about running before they get to high school,” Tompkins said. “If you say ‘cross-country’ or ‘track’ to them, they might not know what that is. And what we’re trying to do is get as many young students as possible involved in running.”
Currently, the team is made up of 25 to 30 children. During practice, the runners do warm-ups, stretches, long-distance runs with hill work, and finish with core and strength work. The students come from James City County, upper York County and Williamsburg, but Tompkins wants to spread the club further.
He believes running on a team can help younger students learn about teamwork as well as individual success.
“With something like a basketball team, there can only be five starters on the court at once. But with cross country, all of the kids get a chance to participate,” he said.
“As an individual you can push yourself and you can train independently, so you have an internal drive, but then when you get connected with a team, every time you run you’re sacrificing yourself a little bit for your teammates.”
Tompkins has an extensive background in coaching runners as the former track coach for Walsingham Academy, Bruton High School and the current coach at Jamestown High School. For him, though, reaching out to students before they enter ninth grade is his goal.
Starting them young
When he was a middle school student himself, Tompkins quit his other sports and fell in love with long-distance running.
“The football coach recruited me and my brother, but then one day the track coach came to us and said ‘Do you want to lose football games or win medals?’ And I was sold,” he said. “If you get these kids hooked, it can become a lifetime sport.”
This is the kind of experience Tompkins wants to share with his younger students as he teaches them basic running techniques and plans practices for all age groups.
The team hosts a few meets and has volunteer coaches, some of whom are high school track runners, but Tompkins wants has even more ideas for the group — ideas that will cost money.
To run with the club, students pay a fee of $30 for eight weeks of practice with one practice each week. For more practice, students can pay $60 for eight weeks with two practices per week. The club offers scholarships for some students, but Tompkins hopes the new nonprofit status will allow them to offer even more.
“Ideally, we would like to host more meets to give the kids competition experience,” he said. “But we also want to expand to more kids, which means we need more coaches.”
Tompkins said he loves coaching the younger age group because they are silly and always positive.
“Track and cross country are neat because the team part is always the fun part, but there’s also a sense of personal satisfaction,” Tompkins said. “I try to show these kids that with running, no matter where you start, you can always get better.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the runners are having fun, Tompkins said, because they put in so much effort during workouts.
But at the end of practice, when they’re enjoying the team ice pops, they always let him know how much they love to run.
