BY ERIN MASTERSON Located near the Fort Belvoir Army base in Virginia, Lake Braddock Secondary School has plenty of students from military families. Of 142 runners on the cross country team this year, approximately 50 hail from military families. Senior Colin Shafer transferred in 2014, after spending his first two years of high school in a small town outside Las Vegas. “He was far and away the best member of the team there,” head coach Mike Mangan said. He arrived in July and began running with the team and when the season started in August, he established himself as the third man on the team and helped the team to win the 6A state championship. “He was a huge piece of that,” Mangan said. “We still had a chance without him, but it was a lot easier with him.” Shafer is now ranked as the third fastest boy in Lake Braddock history, running alongside numbers one and two. When Shafer’s parents transferred to their next assignment, he chose to remain in the area and live with his older sister to finish up his senior year. With Shafer’s leadership, Mangan hopes the team will repeat its success. “Our goal is to repeat as state champions, and I think we have a legitimate shot at that,” Mangan said. Shafer will likely compete for the top slot along with Ben Fogg. The two often traded places last year, each race alternating as the third man on the team. Of the top seven men, the likely first, third, fourth, fifth and sixth runners all have parents in the armed forces, and four of the top seven women do as well. Some kids have moved together several times, one group coming most recently from Fort Campbell, Ky., when their parents all happened to be transferred to the Pentagon. “We’re putting the band back together, essentially,” Mangan said. Students from military families don’t necessarily seek out other runners from military families, but they all tend to associate with each other as a reflection of their shared experiences, he said. “It can be pretty hard on the kids, having to jump into a new program. Some do really well and step up, but for others it doesn’t suit them.” One athlete has been living with extended family in the area since her
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parents have been deployed the past year. Another student recently celebrated her dad’s return home after two years in Kuwait. “He missed a lot of special moments,” Mangan said. The coach views it as his duty to step up for these runners in particular. “We’re trying to take care of them,” he said, “since their parents are taking care of all of us. As a coach, you try to take care of these kids, since they do have special needs. It’s definitely stressful, so we try to do all we can to help.” Other students struggle to make the transition to a large program such as Lake Braddock. With 4,000 students in the combined middle school and high school, “it is very easy to get overwhelmed,” said Mangan. He recently spoke with one incoming student who will soon be moving from a small school in Manhattan, Kan. with her Army family. She was a top runner on her high school team, according to Mangan, but as she looks to join Lake Braddock’s squad of 71 female runners, she can expect to be their 18th runner based on her current 5k time. Anne Northrup competed for Thomas Edison High School last year after moving to Alexandria last summer with her parents and brother. Upon arriving at Edison, Northrup, a rising junior, “stepped right in and was a varsity runner for us — very tenacious,” head cross country coach Berni Flynn said. Northrup is no stranger to moving, having spent the previous year at Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Northrup was born in Florida and has moved approximately every two years, living in Virginia Beach, Northern Virginia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Louisiana, Alabama, and Korea. Her mom, Carol Northrup, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, was selected to be the senior defense attaché to the Embassy of the Ukraine and spent this past year taking diplomacy and language training to prepare. Northrup’s father, Col (Ret.) Parker Northrup, flew B52s as a pilot for the U.S. Air Force and now serves as a flight instructor. The family moved to the Ukraine in late July and plans to be there for two years. While Northrup is a little worried about the transition, never having visited Eastern Europe and not speaking Ukrainian, she