COMMENTARY: Small Success Valued

HAAS HALL RELISHES SECOND PLACE

— We get a lot of emails here at the paper from parents wanting us to write articles about their kids.

Some turn out to be truly unique stories, but most aren’t anything worth Tweeting about. So, when we received one asking us to pay attention to Haas Hall Academy at the state cross country meet Saturday, I took it under advisement, but wasn’t expecting much.

Honestly, I had never heard of this charter school despite it residing in Fayetteville, so when I finally spotted a runner cross the finish line in the Class 2A/1A race with “Haas Hall” across her chest, I followed her, hoping to find the coach.

At these events, coaches are easy to spot because they wear team-colored jump suits. All of them. Well, except for one.

After spotting the Haas Hall-ians without an obvious coach in site, I told a woman I was from the paper and asked about the team.

She started going on about how, while the official team score was unknown at the time, it’s easily the best the school has ever finished, top runners, a brief history, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Suddenly, I said, “Oh, so are you the coach?”

Wearing nicer pants and a blue-and-yellow sweater vest under a prep school jacket, Haas Hall cross country coach Rebecca Moll laughed and confirmed.

I thanked her for her time and figured that was that.

Moll walked down toward the scoreboard as the 2A/1A results were posted, but before she could reach the bottom of the hill, she was mobbed by her team in celebration.

I looked up from my notes to see the Haas Hall boys cross country team was cheering, “We got second.”

Normally, second place only means first loser, but you could tell by their actions that this was big. This was just like winning a state title. This team gets a trophy.

You see, no one goes to Haas Hall to play one of the academy’s three sports — cross country, track or basketball. If you’re going to this school, let’s face it, you’re a nerd (Moll’s words, not mine).

I went back through the Northwest Arkansas Times archive, and in 145 articles that mention the school since its inception in 2004, the only one sports-related was my cross country recap from Saturday.

Haas Hall is a school few people know exist — much less that it’s in Fayetteville. It’s a place where students do a full year’s course work in a semester to help them earn academic scholarships to college, not athletic ones.

No one expected this team to have much of a showing this past weekend. After finishing ninth a year ago, why should they?

But when the Haas Hall cross country team stood on the stage Saturday holding up the first athletic trophy in school history, it was easy to tell that, to these kids, runner-up didn’t simply mean second-place.

Everyone could see that this trophy meant just a little bit more.

Matt L. Stephens is a sports reporter for NWA Media. Email [email protected].

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