Behind the “Cult” of WESS’s Track and Field Team

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a cult is a “group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous.” With such a description, you may not think this word would be applicable to one of the most popular extracurricular activities at WESS. But if you roam the halls of West End Secondary School, you’ll hear it casually used to describe the track and field as well as the cross-country team. 

In fact, this label is so widespread that it has caught on with team members and non-team members alike. But what brought it on, and is it really accurate?

When someone who has been associated with the track or cross-country team is asked about their experience, their focus often shifts to the people who make up the team. Senior Noah Patterson has run since ninth grade, and was briefly a member of the WESS track team before leaving. He admits it was difficult to participate at times because he “didn't like the running," adding, “it was hard to show up at the school at six in the morning some days.” Despite this, Patterson had nothing but positive things to say about his teammates, stating they were “nice to hang out with” and the team “definitely feels like a family.”

When asked about how he feels about the common usage of the term “cult” for the team, Patterson laughingly referred to himself as “an ex-cult member.” Additionally, he refused to elaborate, jokingly continuing, “If I say something, they’ll come for me.” Although Patterson is no longer a member, it is clear that his time at WESS has been shaped by the family-like environment of the track team. 

On the other hand, junior Ginny Sanborn only recently took up running. She described joining the team because she wanted to “feel more motivated, and I [thought] doing a sport was going to help with that." So far, that goal has been a success. According to Sanborn, “no one is really… feeling themselves when they wake up really early on a Saturday to run,” but it facilitates “being able to bond over something that's so physically demanding… It motivates you to care more about each other.”

Much like Patterson, Sanborn emphasized the personal connections she has made throughout the interview. Although she understands the perceptions some students have of the team, Sanborn strictly refers to her teammates as “a good group of people at WESS who I wouldn't really have known otherwise." Furthermore, she argues that the community present within the team is only strange because it is so uncommon at the school, in comparison to other clubs. “People from the outside… can't really conceptualize a group of students, especially at WESS, being so close and spending so much time together until they're a part of it," Sanborn says. “Devoting so much of your time to something, it's sort of hard not to care about it as much as we do.”

At the center of it all is the team’s coach, Robert Dice. When asked why he believes the team’s bonds are so tight-knit, he reasons that “being at practice pretty much every day of the week… doing hard workouts together, that's going to create a certain amount of team bonding.” He adds that within the team, “there's a lot of building each other up, sharing each other's triumphs," and “adversity is going to breed strong relationships.” Dice firmly believes that the relationships forged within the team have been beneficial to its success. “People make the mistake sometimes of thinking that running is an individual sport, but if we take the example of cross-country, cross-country is a team sport," he explains. The girls’ cross-country team was one of only 20 to qualify for New York City championships in their first year of competition, which Dice attributes to their training retreat in the Catskills and the bonds they formed while there.

All of this ties back to the central question: are the WESS track and field and cross country teams a cult? It may always depend on who you ask, but from the team’s perspective, the feeling is best described by Ginny Sanborn: “We are not actually a cult. We just run.”