BENTONVILLE -- It's a cry that has become familiar with Bentonville's boys cross country runners during their occasional training runs along Phillips Cemetery Road.
Coach Mike Power simply tells them "You gotta beat the goat."
Wait a minute. Goat? Nobody in the area has that mascot. The only school in the state with anything similar is Monticello, but the Tigers never run against the Billies.
No, the opposition is actually a goat. The animal, whose owner remains unknown, appears from time to time during the training runs along this route and gives them a little more incentive during the latter stretch.
"The goat is infamous for beating runners," senior Brooks Hedstrom said. "So it's been our goal to go out and beat the goat. It's a foot race with the goat all the way back."
The Tigers began using Phillips Cemetery Road -- located east of Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport -- as a training area about two years ago, when Power searched for a good area with dirt roads where runners could train. He was told about the location by a former athlete, then drove out himself and realized it would work.
The area provides a 5.3-mile loop -- an unforgiving course at times, according to Power -- and includes a bridge that provides a good spot to start and finish runs, so they began using it. What they didn't know about the area until the first training run was that from time to time, a competitive goat shows up.
"The first workout we had, we want past some houses and there aren't many houses out there," Power said. "We went by one house, and all of a sudden this goat comes out there and runs with the boys.
"The boys were running at a 6-minute pace, and this overweight goat is staying right with them. The goat runs for about a mile and a half down to the bridge, so we named that the 'goat bridge.' It's sort of our mascot out there, and if you can beat the goat, you're pretty good."
Chase Smith, now a senior on Bentonville's team, was one of the first runners to have a close encounter with the goat when it appeared in front of him out of nowhere during that first run. He said he was never afraid of it, and he even discovered the goat to be friendly and petted it.
Then he tried to outrun it -- and failed, as did other runners. The goat stayed with Smith all the way to the bridge that Power uses as a starting and stopping point for their training runs.
"I just thought it was funny that it was running with us," Smith said. "I don't think we've actually seen its full potential because it just runs along beside us, then it just goes and walks around."
The goat continued to appear from time to time during the first year and gave the runners that occasional extra challenge, but it never showed up at all during last year's training runs. Power and the team even feared it might have died.
That all changed upon a return to the area for a training run last month. The goat -- now a much leaner version -- re-appeared before Hedstrom and Jonathan Prince and resumed its usual pace with the runners.
"I had always been told by coach Power and those before me that the goat would come out," senior Cameron Hill said. "When I first saw it, I thought 'Oh. It's a lot smaller than I thought.' It's a small goat, but it's pretty quick."
Sports on 10/02/2014