The Long View: The Rise of Tandem XC Issue 1

The Long View: The Rise of Tandem XC

You may not think of Tandem, our alma mater, as an athletic powerhouse. Yet for a school of our size, we’ve had some incredible triumphs in sports. Back in the early 2010s, girls soccer was the dominant program at Tandem. They were on a 3-year state championship winning streak. Yet, with a small pool of students there’s always an ebb and flow, a rise and fall. When one program is big and popular, it draws students away from others. The dominant program today, whether you believe it or not, is cross country.

This all started with history teacher, Jason Farr, and former head of school, Andy Jones-Wilkins. 

Jason and Andy were both competitive ultrarunners and they started going on runs together. Andy remembers, “We would spend time just kind of running and talking about stuff.” One of the things they talked about was a vision for what cross country could be at Tandem.

Jason remembers, “We both agreed that, of all the sports, cross country was a perfect Tandem sport.” He says, “At most schools the cross country kids are kind of quirky and good students and that’s like most Tandem kids: quirky, good students, and willing to work hard.”

Running also embodies the Quaker tenet of Simplicity. Andy believed that the program could work and grow without a lot of tending. The thought was, Andy says, “to develop an anchor program with a sport where it didn’t matter if you had a lot of kids or a few kids. You didn’t need a lot of equipment. You didn’t need a fancy facility. You didn’t need a whole lot of skills. You didn’t need to have grown up coming through a pipeline of youth soccer or basketball or anything else.”

On a hot summer day in 2013, Andy called Jason to his office in the Main Building. He wanted to ask Jason if he’d like to be the new cross country coach after Joe Doherty, (MS Math/Science teacher), the current coach, was leaving.

Jason says, remembering that day in Andy’s office, “I was very brazen and confident and I said ‘Give me ten years, I can win a state championship.’ Andy kind of laughed at that and said, ‘I LOVE IT!’”

Maybe it was the heat or Andy’s exuberance, but Jason had some experience to back him up. Though he grew up in Tennessee playing football and didn’t get into running until college, Jason later worked under a great high school cross country coach in Asheville, North Carolina, Steve Carpenter. Jason says, “I learned a lot when I was in Asheville. That was one reason I had so much confidence.” Steve shared with Jason, but he also knew what an opportunity it was so Jason says he “watched and observed and absorbed everything I could.” 

What Jason saw is that Steve’s system worked. “He took kids through a lot of psychological work, and just got a lot out of them.” In Asheville, Jason learned that developing a great team is less about perfecting strategy and more about building a culture. He calls this “one of the secrets of coaching running.” That really it all comes down to, as Jason says, “getting kids to believe that they can do hard things.”

Ultimately, getting kids to believe they can do hard things isn’t about physical training or even sports necessarily. It’s mental. In truth, so much of running is. Jason admits “Not every coach can do that and I don’t do it with every kid, but I think we’ve built a culture where now the kids help each other.”

How did they get there? How do you build a culture?

Part 1: The Early Days

In the early days of Jason’s tenure as cross country coach, the focus was on getting kids to join the team and making running fun. Tandem XC was full of fun. For as much as running can be mentally and physically grueling, the team made up for it with ample amounts of silliness.

Noah Tinsley ’18 shares, “I think the team had a really cool vibe. It’s a cool sport because it really combines team effort and individuals trying to do their thing.” Noah also remembers one race, “There was this puddle and I remember going and laying in the puddle” after the race. “Felt really good,” he says.

I began running cross country with Andy when I was in 6th grade. In 8th grade, I joined the Varsity squad and being a part of this team had a huge impact on my Tandem experience. There was no shame in cross country. We talked about it all, all the gross, nasty, weird parts of pushing your body to the limits of what it could do.

Another muddy memory comes from Pearl Outlaw ’15: “I went on a summer run and it ended up being super rainy and muddy and basically we just embraced it. We were running in the rain, and we were covered in mud, and we jumped in the lake over at the development. We took this photo when we got back and we’re just all smiling, covered in mud.”

Tandem XC May, 2014

I think this image captures what cross country was in those days. Not pretty or perfect, but fun, everyone embracing the messiness and getting down in the mud.

Pearl remembers the toughness, grit, and wildness of the team in the first few years with Jason coaching. Alec Simon ‘16 “forgot his shoes one day and we were running hill sprints, and so he ran hill sprints in bare feet. His feet were black and blue and grass stained. We would do anything for Jason. We were like ‘Okay, Jason, whatever you say!’”

Perhaps it sounds a bit cultish, buying into the extreme, and willing to do anything for your “guru.” But it was also a safe and warm place, where everyone’s individual goals were just as important as any collective mission.

Pearl Outlaw is one of the great Tandem XC legends. She represents what the team was, and is, at its core, as well as how being a part of something special can change your life.

Growing up, Pearl says that sports “didn’t feel super comfortable for me. They were very intimidating.” But she knew she wanted to continue participating in athletics and “cross country just seemed the most welcoming and comfortable.”

Pearl remembers, “I didn’t see myself as a runner at all before that.” Being a part of the cross country team was different than any other sport she had tried. “I remember immediately feeling so comfortable and just not judged.”

This is the consistent message I heard, and what I remember from being a part of the team myself. In many ways it’s part of what makes Tandem special, its unique, good energy. But that special Tandem feeling became concentrated, for many, on the cross country team.

Pearl says, “While I was running, my vision was changing, too. Now, I’m nearly completely blind, but back then I could still run, and I would pretty much just follow whoever was in front of me.” She remembers one race her senior year, the meet before states, where the course was mostly through open grass fields. As it was getting dark “I started to realize like ‘oh, my gosh I can’t see where I’m going.’ And I don’t know what people around me were thinking because I kept saying that to the spectators, and I think they were just confused. But no one was doing anything. I was like ‘I can’t see!’ Literally I can’t see the trail.’”

A little further along the course she found Jason and the boys’ team, on a cool down run after their race and then she found Emma Passino ‘17. Emma and Pearl grabbed each other and they “held hands basically for the rest of the race and ran together because I had lost my way,” Pearl says with a sarcastic chuckle.

If you asked Jason, he would say this is what Tandem XC is all about. Not a state title, but moments like these, when people come together to support one another. At the end of every season, Jason holds a party to celebrate and acknowledge that year’s group of runners. It’s an important part of the culture, celebrating milestones, accomplishments, and setting goals for the future.

Before we ever won any titles, he created awards to honor the values of the team: courage, tenacity, kindness. He named an award after Pearl, called the ‘Pearl Outlaw Courage Award.’ It’s a high honor in the name of an incredible and inspiring athlete.

Pearl Outlaw, September 2014

For Pearl, who now competes as a professional rower, Jason’s ability to recognize and lift up every runner is an essential component of a great team. She says, “any team that I’ve been on, the best ones are where no matter if you’re the fastest on the team or the back of the pack, you still feel like the coach believes in you and is invested in you. I think Jason was really able to do that,” says Pearl. “You just felt like he cared about every single person on the team and how they did, no matter where they were in their running.”

Even though Pearl has reached incredible heights in her athletic career, rowing for the United States in three world championships, she’s still finding new ways to challenge herself. This year she switched from flatwater rowing, in rivers and streams, to coastal rowing, off beaches and in the ocean. Pearl says, “I just did my first world championship with them in September and we were the first para-team basically in the sport that had competed at world championships.”

Her running days came back in use in coastal rowing. One of the events involves sprinting down the beach into the water and jumping into the boat. One day, Pearl says “we were practicing that, and I did my first sprint into the water, and I think I face planted in a wave or something, but from that moment on I was like ‘this is awesome! This is amazing!’”

It’s that attitude, getting knocked down by a wave and thinking ‘I can’t wait to do that again,’ that Jason hopes to cultivate as an essential, courageous, and joyful part of the cross country team.

Reminiscing about the old days running cross country, Pearl is smiling. She remembers “I think it was cross country first” where “I started seeing myself as an athlete...and feeling like even with my eyesight I could really do anything.”

The one bad memory, Pearl says, is of the cross country page of the yearbook from her senior year which only had photos of the boys running; none of the girls were represented. I went back and looked. The title reads “Varsity Cross Country” and we see Jason and the boys, but none of the girls on the team.

This oversight marks an issue that the cross country team has faced for some time and is still working through. It’s been one of the only co-ed sports at Tandem, and boys and girls practicing together has been one of the things that makes the team unique and special. But often the focus and the spotlight has been on the boys. This is something Jason is aware of and has been trying to remedy, shifting his focus in recent years to the development of the girls team.

I remember at the end-of-season party in my senior year, Jason handed out bricks that were painted green with silver writing that read “TANDEM XC.” He gave a brick to each of the girls and told us that we were the foundation. This literally heavy-handed metaphor made me laugh, but I also felt hopeful that we would grow. I still have my brick. Since then, the girls team has faced hurdles, growing and then falling in numbers again during the pandemic. Now, it’s on the rise with a strong group of runners, many of them sophomores and freshman, poised to flourish.

Jason says, “We had six girls on the team last year and 18 boys, and that’s my big goal now; I want to build the girl’s program to the same level.”

The cross country team faces a unique challenge as it seeks to hold both teams under one umbrella of coaches and resources. Still, Jason’s distinct style and approach help him to connect to all kinds of runners.

A characteristic of Jason’s coaching style is the use of mantras to develop mental confidence. He drills the team with these repetitive phrases and metaphors. They’re often funny, but Jason explains that “running is 90 percent mental and the other 10 percent is in your head.”

The value in these mantras he says, “is that there comes a point in every race or hard workout where you’re full of doubt. Doubt will creep in because you’re pushing your body to its maximum…you’re asking your body to do something right on the edge of what’s possible.”

Oftentimes cramps, that pinch in the side, are neuromuscular. “Mantras are just ways to trick that neuromuscular pathway, by making the “pain cave” a happy place that you want to visit. It normalizes the suffering.” But pain is a tricky thing. It’s important to attend to, not hide from, because ignoring pain can lead to injury.

The “pain-cave” is one of Jason’s most famous mantras. I remember him drawing it on the white board in the Field House. You journey into and through this painful place, but there is another side, something to be found by making it through. Noah Tinsley remembers, “I think Jason kind of portrayed it in a funny context, like ‘oh yeah they’re in the pain cave,’ but everyone knows it’s a very real thing. It wasn’t a thing to be avoided. It’s just gonna happen.”

In the early days, the team made t-shirts that said “It’s Supposed to Hurt.” But Jason avoids some of that rhetoric now. “In the beginning,” he says, “it was a matter of distinguishing between jogging and racing. To actually race, it’s going to be painful, and you have to know that and prepare for it.”

Here’s Noah again: “You can extrapolate that in a life way. You’re going to end up in other pain caves and that’s not a bad thing if you’re in the pain cave. It’s just good to say ‘I know that I’m here, and I know there’s something waiting for me if I go through this properly.’ I feel like the worst pain cave is if you just kind of avoid the pain.”

The truth is, despite their strangeness, the mantras seem to work, and they become a part of the fabric and the language of the team. A key lesson from cross country for Noah, he says, was “the idea of separating your mind and your body, and being able to trust your body beyond what your mind thinks of it.”