The philosophy of the Paly XC team is to honor everybody's effort, not just the best runners on the team.

XC is a non-cut sport at Paly and while our Varsity teams are highly competitive, an enormous amount of effort is put into making the experience a special one for athletes of all abilities.

Every year about 100 boys and girls of all ages and abilities come out for the team, and our goal as coaches is to teach them the value of hard-work. We track the improvement of every runner, and when athletes make significant improvements they are recognized for the hard work they have done. Workouts and races become as much a celebration of the fruits of hard labor as they are a competition.

Every year boys join the team who can't run a 7 minute mile, and by the end of XC many of them are breaking 6 minutes for that same distance. We have a senior this year who as a freshman ran 27:56 on our 3-mile home XC course - he was one of the slowest boys on the team, but he stuck with it! By the end of his freshman season his time had dropped to 24:00, and he continued to train. A year later he ran 21:00, and he kept right on training! When his junior year finished his new personal best was 18:50, and this year as a senior he is going to try to become the first Paly boy (to our knowledge) to improve by 10 minutes over the course of his career! Think about how incredible it is to improve by 10 minutes over a 3 mile race in just 4 years!

And Alok's story is not alone. If you look through our roster and read the blurbs about each athlete, you'll notice a very obvious trend - everyone gets faster!

We believe, as coaches, that this experience, of seeing hard work pay off, is something that will give confidence to our athletes for the rest of their lives, in all aspects of their lives.