Column: Lions’ harriers still on hunt
Andrew Gideon hopes his seventh year as Eureka’s cross country coach ends like his sixth, which means a State B boys’ championship.
The one the Lions earned last year was their first, and first for the Western B since Thompson Falls won the boys’ title in 2007.
As circumstances would have it Gideon was an assistant coach in Thompson Falls that season; and so he figured he had some idea what it would take to build up Eureka’s program.
It wasn’t promising. Gideon researched and Eureka had managed one full team of seven athletes twice from 2000-13: One boys’ and one girls’.
“Most small towns are football towns,” Gideon noted. “But if you bring some energy to anything – music, or whatever – you’re going to get some kids interested.”
Then he called his first summer workout – it was June 17, 2014 – and one boy and one girl showed. Undaunted, he told each runner to bring one friend to the next workout.
Only the girl – Alex Bartmess, who was fifth at State in 2013 – showed. She was alone.
“So my dream of growing this exponentially was over,” Gideon joked. “But actually with her enthusiasm, she ended up recruiting a couple girls. And that first season we had 23 runners, including four middle-school kids.”
Bartmess would end up finishing fifth at state a second straight year, then went on to run at Black Hills (S.D.) State. By 2014 the Thompson Falls boys’ were fourth at state; the girls were seventh. In 2015 the girls brought home some third-place hardware. And so it went.
Gideon comes from a running family – his brother Steve has coached and taught in Darby for a quarter-century – though he didn’t compete in high school. He ran on his own, he said, to help him play basketball for the Missoula Sentinel Spartans and American Legion baseball for the Mavericks.
He has almost always coached. By 1983, when he was 15, he’d run a T-ball team. He was coaching middle school teams by the time he graduated from Sentinel in 1986; he was a Mavericks assistant at 19.
“I’ve got something like 71 seasons coaching,” he said. “I know the Montana Coaches’ Association counts years, but I tend to count seasons. At one time I had a goal to get to 100 seasons; but I don’t know.”
This year’s Lions are an imposing group, though the No. 1 runner from last year, Isaac Reynolds, has battled concussions. Cross country is not that much of a contact sport, or course; sometimes branches break or the like, and Gideon rates Reynolds as questionable for the State B meet Friday at Rebecca Farm.
Either way the Lions have come a long way. The State B boys’ crown has often been the purview of Manhattan or Red Lodge, but then came that Eureka moment.
Gideon would like to see it continue; he points back to 2006, when Thompson Falls’ boys took fourth at State.
“I challenged them to do the extra running, and if they did I’d run a 50-mile race,” he said. They did, and he did. A state title followed. “We took our lives to a different level, I think,” Gideon said.
It’s happening again. That boy that didn’t show the second day in 2014? Stephen Cooke returned sooner rather than later. He’s still running, and he started a legacy.
“I’m on my fourth Cooke,” Gideon said. Come Friday, with senior Hentry and sophomore Ben, the Lions will still be Cooke-ing.
Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or at fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com