Bill Aris Took 'Revolutionary' Departure From Norm To Build Fayetteville-Manlius Cross Country Into A Juggernaut

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By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Fifteen years ago, as Bill Aris took over as the boys and girls head cross country coach at Fayetteville-Manlius NY for the first time, he had an idea ripe for an experiment.

What if he took the eight best boys on the team to a training camp in the Adirondack Mountains and immersed them with an ambitious daily load of hard running while feeding their imaginations with stories about a 1950s mad-scientist Australian coach named Percy Cerutty, and his prodigy, Herb Elliott?

What if he could convince them to embrace a Cerutty-style vision of running – to live “pure,” to find harmony with nature, to embrace discomfort, to work and endure for the collective success of the group.

In the summer of 2004, Aris had the right group of boys to be able to explore his new ideas and take a risk. In the span of a week that included 111 miles and a lot of talking about concepts like “selflessness” and “pain is the purifier,” Aris laid the groundwork for a team culture unlike any other in high school running.

“In 2004, those guys soaked it up like a sponge,” Aris said. “They absolutely were enthralled with it.”

The new book, “Amazing Racers,” peels back the curtain and recounts the history of that week and all that followed – more than decade’s worth of stunning victories that stamped F-M as the nation’s most successful high school cross country program.

Aris, in re-packaging Cerutty’s “Stotan” ideals for modern teenagers at a public high school in the suburbs of Syracuse, N.Y, challenged his teams to do things that went against the grain. He discussed philosophy and psychology and art as he cajoled his athletes to give more, love one another and chase their enormous potential.

Author Marc Bloom, who has written about and contributed to high school cross country for nearly 50 years, takes readers deep into the psyche of Aris and a cross country program that has astounded and mystified followers of Nike Cross Nationals – an event the F-M girls have won 11 times in 15 years. The boys have just one title (2014), but more top-three finishes (five) than any other.

Bloom locked on to Aris and F-M in the fall of 2004 at the Manhattan Invitational at Van Cortlandt Park, when the boys upset highly ranked Christian Brothers Academy NJ with a record-breaking team performance that the was the precursor for a second-place finish at the inaugural Nike championship in Portland.

In the post-race interview, Bloom learned of Aris’ camp, the Stotan (stoic + Spartan) ethos that permeated the team, and was struck with the realization that something “revolutionary” was taking place.

“Amazing Racers” is the assembled oral history of Aris and his runners. Bloom applies a layer of contextual child/teen psychology studies that explain not only how the revolution unfolded, but why. As it turns out, teen brains have an unquenchable thirst to be part of something bigger than themselves, and they are willing to make sacrifices in order to make it happen.

Go out and run until you'd rather be dead. Go home and eat the entirety of your fridge. Fall asleep by nine.
Wake up the next day and repeat. Try not to cry. - Molly Malone

The book was originally intended to cover the 10-year span between 2004 and 2014, the year that F-M climbed to its highest pinnacle by sweeping the boys and girls NXN championships at Glendoveer Golf Course. But the F-M girls kept winning, in 2015, 2016 and 2017, requiring new epilogues each time.

This month’s book release offers readers an in-depth look at the athletes to who bought in to Aris’ ideas and the restless effort to keep at it, year after year.

Earlier this month, Bloom and Aris attended a book release and signing event at a Barnes and Noble in Syracuse. Much to the coach’s surprise, he was greeted by a crowd.

“The store closes at 9 and we were signing books until past 10,” Aris said.

Interest in high school cross country may go only so far with the public. But understanding how F-M did it, and how it continues to do it, brings about concepts and roadmaps that apply to a world far beyond running.

The book’s impact on the sport, whether this fall or beyond, remains to be seen. Will other coaches emulate the F-M model?

Even if it served no other purpose than to chart the history of Nike Cross Nationals, through an F-M lens, the book is a must-read for the community that loves the sport. Bloom's unique vantage point inside the national meet is fascinating on its own.

“In terms of what the book means and the world reading it, I think people who buy it hoping to find the magic bullet will be disappointed,” Aris said. “It’s not a coaching manual. It’s a history of the experience of what it was like, year to year, with our personnel. It’s everything beyond the running training.”

New ideas about how to train runners are few and far between. Mileage. Fartlek. Intervals. Long runs. Core exercises. Some weightlifting. Hard days. Easy days.

Those ingredients don’t explain the dominance of the F-M running machine.

RunnerSpace 'Secrets To Success' Interview With Bill Aris

Yes, Aris asked for more than most coaches in workouts. His athletes work hard, perhaps harder than anyone else. But first and foremost the championship teams were built on love and trust and the unbreakable bonds forged on afternoons at Green Lakes State Park, the Hornets’ training ground.

In the years following the original 2004 “Stotans,” Aris adapted his message and built upon it. He began applying the message to his girls team in 2006 when he felt he had the right group to handle it.

Unlike Cerutty, who operated at a time before gender equity, Aris has always felt that his ideas could be applied the same way to boys and girls. His insistence in blurring the gender lines within the program, to treat males and females as “athletes,” was an empowering message that did something to spur the girls in the program to greatness.

Aris convinced all of his best athletes that effort was communal and that suffering was easier to bear when it was shared among teammates. He showed them that greatness could be attained by replacing me-first ego with selflessness. He orchestrated a deep-seated feeling that accountability to one another was more than powerful, it was sacred.

“Eighty percent of my time is involved with building culture, synergy and what’s between the ears,” Aris said.

Back in 2004, after a decade as a volunteer and assistant coach, Aris merely had an itch to scratch after reading Cerruty’s books. Could it work with modern teenagers?

He set out to test his theory that it could.  

Through the years, as Aris’ long team speeches morphed from sermons to talking points, he was able to instill belief and resolve into athletes who sought to perpetuate a legacy of excellence.

Even today, with the F-M girls ranked US#3 in the preseason and the boys US#6, there is a built-in assumption in those projections that Aris will motivate and instruct teams that go beyond the sum of their parts.

The secret of how a public high school cross country team with limited numbers could produce so many standout runners and render the questions posed by Nike Cross Nationals moot, has confounded the running community for years.

“Amazing Racers” offers a sense of transparency. Aris knows he has been branded by some as a “slave driver,” but that assessment was always a mistaken assumption. Instead, there was something going on that was more profound.

The truth is, F-M’s runners liked working hard and loved winning, just like their coach. The new book, at 332 pages, articulates the ideas behind F-M’s phenomenal run and enables the running community, for the first time, to understand how they mesh with mileage to create something extra.