Watching the workouts at Page and Grimsley

I dropped by both of the schools on Monday and even though the rain was coming down, the practices carried on like normal. The Page football team was hard at it and on the main football field area above the Pirate gridiron practice facilities, the cross country team was very active.

The Pirate football team was running plays in preparation for Northeast Guilford on the road at Bill Bookout Stadium this Friday night. The spirit and overall mood in the Page practice was upbeat and the coaches were doing a great job of keeping their players motivated and focused on the task at hand with NEG just four days away. Page has a lot on their plate right now after the events surrounding last week’s game at WS Reynolds and the Page Pirate Plan seems to be in place for this week.

The Page cross country team was very busy with their workouts and former Pirate soccer coach Zach Osborne is the X-Country leader now and he has about 30-40 kids, both boys and girls, training for the upcoming season. The Page runners work out around the track at the main Page football field inside Marion Kirby Stadium. The runners will get a few laps in around the track after their stretching and warmups are over and then they start the serious stuff.

The runners will take one lap around the track and then they leave out of the stadium and make their way all the way around the football practice facility. That probably comes out to about a mile course by the time they head back on to the track and make one final lap in reverse direction from the way they exited the stadium. You run that last lap backwards and then you are done for a few minutes. After about five minutes rest, you repeat that same run again, and end up doing it at least 4-5 times in the practice.

The kid who wears the baseball cap backwards is the top runner right now for Page and he was the leader on Monday as the team made their way around the facilities. The kid with the baseball cap turned around backwards will be hard to beat, but we will need to see what he has in store when he takes to a real cross country course, with hills and roots and crazy twists and turns.

A couple of Coach Osborne’s lines were almost right out of the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”.

The coach would tell the runners when they showed up for practice, and they didn’t all show up at the same tiime, “SIGN IN”…..”Sign in at the concession stand”. Page had about 8 runners when practice started and then 30-40 by the time everyone had arrived. “SIGN IN”….”Sign in at the concession stand”.

If you were a Grimsley football player on Monday you may have felt like you were at the “Hotel California”. “You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave”. That had to be one of the toughest practices I have ever seen. The running at the end of practice was not for the faint of heart, lungs or stomach. Coach Mark Saunders has just three days this week to get his team ready for the Thursday game against Northern Durham and the Whirlies didn’t play well at all in the first half at Martinsville this past Saturday, and on Monday they were paying the price.

Hit me with a pass, there was no passing in the gassers at the end of practice. You could not pass go because you had no chance to stop. Keep on going and hope you don’t pass out. Coach Saunders had the Whirlies working on Monday and I bet the players had no problem sitting still in school today, on the first day of classes for the Guilford County Schools.

A good prolonged hard workout by Grimsley on Monday and with RB David Ray back in camp yesterday, Grimsley knows the bottom line is they will be facing more of the same in practice today(Tuesday), with just one more day of heavy work before Thursday night and the Knights of Northern Durham at Jamieson Stadium.

You can learn a lot from watching the kids work out.

7 thoughts on “Watching the workouts at Page and Grimsley

  1. It’s good to see the cross country team get some publicity, haha. Backwards hat kid is our best runner;
    I think he’s in the 18-19 min range, and only a sophomore. This year, “little one”, a five foot even freshman will give backwards hat a run for his money. Coach Osborne’s response to the rainy practices? “There’s no bad weather, only soft people.”

  2. The backwards cap Kid is gonna be one to watch if he is turning 18-19 minute times on the 3.1 mile course. Where is the home cross country course for Page? Do they use Bryan Park and what is the name of the Kid with the backwards ball cap? We need to keep a GREENSBOROSports.com bulletin out for him.

  3. Yeah this kid is pretty good. His name’s Landon Kinsey, he plays tennis too. Our home course is out at Haganstone State park, which doesn’t make much sense. Landon broke 11 minutes in a 3k race last week, with another 3k coming up this Thursday.

  4. No, just the first two. Word is, tomorrow’s meet will likely be canceled/ postponed if it rains much between now and then.

  5. Don’t know all of the particulars but if there is meet or race scheduled at Haganstone Park and the crew out there puts down the heavy mulch you can pretty much run after Noah went through the park in his ark.

    I have never seen anything like that heavy mulch that they put down on the course at Haganstone. The low lying areas when you come out of the woods at about the mile and half mark can be real wet so that might cut down on the chances for the race.

    The grounds up around the barn will also be wet but they dry out as you pass the lake and head toward the old schoolhouse.

    It’s a real nice course and especially fun to run on after a light snowfall has hit the area.

    Good talk about cross country and who is supposed to be the best team in the area this year? Didn’t Mount Tabor have some good distance runners, I know they have a super 100 meters man in Hunter Furr but he plays football and is better suited for the short runs. My brain would also tell me that with more in-depth thinking, Northwest Guiflord should have an excellent cross country squad based on prior performance.

    Pass the word to the other students, we are talking about them here at GREENSBOROSports.com.

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