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From the Sidelines to the Starting Line
A trip to the 2007 NTN Championships as a fan becomes motivation for Don Bosco runner
Saturday, December 6, 2008 - Portland Meadows, Portland, Or
Brendan Offer
During the championship part of the 2007 cross counter season, Brendan Offer (Don Bosco Prep, NJ) was a junior varsity runner on the #1 team in New Jersey. As the top 7 ran to county and state titles, Offer and the rest of the team would dress up in kilts, paint their faces, bang drums, do their best impersonation of Braveheart and cheer on their friends to the New Jersey State Championship and 3rd at the Northeast Regional. Based on the strength of their season. the Bosco team earned a spot on the starting line in Portland as an at-large selection. Offer and a small group of the cheering section made the trip to Oregon to show the west coast how New Jersey schools support their teams. With face paint and a boom box to make noise, the Bosco cheering section spurred their teammates on to a 10th place finish.
For Offer the experience was a life-altering event and one that would motivate him to train harder than he ever had, working his way onto the Bosco varsity which won the Eastern States Championship and the New Jersey Non-Public “A” State title, and then 2nd at the New Jersey Meet of Champs in 2008. Last weekend Offer's dream became a reality when the Bosco team (known as Bergen XC) placed 2nd at the Northeast Regional, earning a return trip to Portland. This trip, Offer has moved off the sidelines and onto the starting line. Below is his reflection on last year’s trip and the upcoming weekend.
I'm about to head to Portland for the second year in a row, but this time I'm running as the 6th man on my team. One year ago, I found myself boarding a plane to go to Nike Nationals, but oddly enough it wasn't to run. I was flying out to cheer on my teammates. I felt that I owed it to them in celebration of their great season.
My friends and I were ecstatic to be flying from New York to Oregon by ourselves. As I stepped off the plane and realized that we arrived in Oregon, I thought to myself "Oh God, what have we gotten ourselves into?"
Once we were settled at our hotel, we walked to the Embassy Suites where the team was staying. They were as excited to see us as we were to see them. Later, we decided to go to the local Target to pick up a boom box. During the walk home, two of my friends, Joe Amoresano and Frank Gassert, spotted a party store, where we bought body paint..
After a long night we decided to head back to the hotel to sleep, well…kind of. As a prank, we armed ourselves with as many ice cubes as possible and then slowly made our way to our friends' room. On a simple 1 2 3 count, we attacked. Mike Belgiovine, another friend who will also be running this weekend, found some coins and threw them across the room, only to cause a racket. Our other friends were happy when we left.
 The next morning my friends and I ( Brendan Offer - at left in hat with Bosco fans - photo by John Nepolitan) traveled to Portland Meadows Race Track. As we entered, we tried to make as big a scene as possible by blasting techno from the boom box. We cheered, yelled, and danced and a race hadn't even gone off yet. After the boys open race, we met up with our team's #8 man, Steve Flanagan, and he was all up for using the body paint. Led by two of the seniors, Eric Schmidt and Mike Vega, we raced back to the cars and began to paint our bodies to spell B-O-S-C-O-X-C. Oddly enough, some people even wanted to take pictures with us.
After the race, we continued to walk around blasting music and caught the attention of the team from Henry D. Sheldon High School in Eugene, Oregon. We continued to party with our newfound friends and urged others to join us.
It was finally time to depart and head off to dinner at the prestigious Nike Campus. Following dinner was the awards ceremony. Afterwards, another companion of mine, Brendan Travers, got the idea to start a cheer. So, we obnoxiously stood there and cheered away. We headed back to the hotel to get ready for the famous Nike dance involving all teams. It was certainly a sight, seeing teams that only hours ago were distant opponents now wildly dancing with one another.
Before we knew it, it was time to depart. The trip home was an experience in itself. We had a connecting flight to catch in Chicago, but the flight was cancelled due to weather. While most people would be upset, we were celebrating. To our disbelief, our friend Ryan Muldoon got us tickets on a flight that would leave in a couple of hours. We brought out the boom box inside the terminal and started blasting the song "Vamos a la Playa." Frankly, I was happy we didn't get arrested.
Hours later we boarded a flight home and arrived in New York at 2AM. All in all, this was one of the best experiences of my life and I was sad that it was over.
 The 2007 Nike Nationals changed my life. Watching my teammates reap the benefits of their hard work truly motivated me to try harder at running. I started to do some of my base mileage for winter track and made sure that I would go out by myself every day and hammer almost all the runs. People questioned why I was suddenly working so hard, but I didn't care what they thought. I knew that if I started to care about the cross country team that I could work my way up to Varsity and hopefully make it back to Nike Nationals, but this time as a runner.
I made small improvements over the year and improved my two-mile time from 11:00 to 9:54. The summer came and went and the runs became harder and harder, and I didn't know how much more I could take. My team and I were thirsty for our first cross country race of the year, and we knew right after that race, finishing first, all the hard work paid off.
Going back to Nike Nationals in Oregon was my dream, and it wasn't an easy one to accomplish. Our team has struggled and even this late in the season, we still haven't put together a great race, but hopefully the NXNs will be that race. But no matter what happens at Nationals, this will again be an experience of a lifetime
Brendan Offer at the Bergen Meet of Champs - photo by John Nepolitan
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