The Under 700 Club: The Long Green Line (2008)

The story of a high school cross country team.

The Under 700 Club: Reviews in under 700 words for movies with less than 700 logs on Letterboxd (log count as of this publication: 173)

I ran cross country and long distances for indoor/outdoor track in high school. I think I had a pretty good attitude about it. I worked hard, trained 50 weeks out of the year, won small races, and finished something like 134th in big races.

The one thing I just never got used to was the boredom. On more than one occasion, we would take a bus four or five hours across the state, sit around at a track meet all day waiting to run for two minutes and six seconds, wait a few more hours for it to wrap, and take the bus the five hours home.

A lot of boredom. Crossword puzzles. Watching movies on portable DVD players. Exploring the menus of nearby strip mall Chinese places. 

And if you ever had the displeasure of riding a charter bus (those equipped with bathrooms and TVs) for more than 87 minutes on your way to a cross country meet, then your coach threw The Long Green Line in the bus's DVD player.

I think I've seen this movie a dozen times. There's a reason coaches show it (I've also seen Prefontaine and Chariots of Fire on these buses): it's a movie about an excellent coach, accomplished runners, and high school's legacy of success.

For your coach and mine, it's passive coaching at its finest.

Following the 2005 season of the boys cross country team at York Community High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, it's head coach Joe Newton's 50th year coaching. The team is aiming for their 25th Illinois state title, a record they hold that crushes any other school, largely because they're the only school even in the double digits.

Mr. Newton is in his salad days, running a team of well over two hundred boys and coaching his seven varsity runners the same way he coaches the slowest freshman. For Newton, it's about separating the boys from the men and hoping that translates to their commitment on the course. Really, it's about knowing that it will. His coaching strategy (probably because the 76-year-old can't get around like he used to) is about reading famous motivational quotes from a paper, shaking the hands and looking in the eyes of each of his men, making new runners earn their jerseys. It's about mental toughness and intestinal fortitude. The running will come because they want to get better. Watching it again all these years later, Newton's coaching stands out to me as I'm now an educator myself.

But what I found so much fun during this latest rewatch was how the movie operates as a time capsule of high school cross country. The distance runs in the rain, the grueling track workouts, the nicknames (York features a Small Fry and twin brothers aptly named Twin 1 and Twin 2; I can remember a kid called Fat and a guy nicknamed Beavis on our team, among others), the juvenility, (we also found it funny when our coaches swore, but we never had students expelled and arrested for arson) - it's all there. 

Save for a couple, there aren't really a ton of running movies. It's not a particularly cinematic sport, it's hard to cover (this film's documentary crew can only be in so many places at once across the course) and slow motion is an unfortunate standard cliche of the "genre.” As a result, you watch the same ones over and over again on these charter buses. This one has championship-caliber runners, an all-time great high school coach, and winning attitudes. There are worse things to show kids on their way to a meet. 

Like that one time we watched Pirates of the Caribbean and then caught our married, middle-aged assistant coach Googling "Keira Knightley hot." 

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