Alexis Zicher had one goal in mind when she was driving around, looking for her students' homes: get these health physical forms filled out.
“It was all a blur,” she said. “I was just making a lot of home visits because I just wanted to make sure that these kids had an opportunity,”
Zicher and Erik Dandy both work at Waller-Williams Environmental School. Zicher is a mental health practitioner and Dandy is a safety administrator. Both of them are former college athletes who wanted to share what they learned through sports with the students at Waller. So, they decided to start a track and field team at the school.
Waller isn’t known for its athletics. The school had a basketball team at some point but the coach left after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person activities, according to Dandy.
“There’s so many life lessons from sports, period,” Dandy said. “That’s why I love coaching sports and trying to introduce sports to as many people as I can.”
So, the goal was to reintroduce sports to Waller. Students who attend Waller had some kind of behavioral incident that led them to the school.
“Sometimes when kids are here at Waller, they have this negative perception of themselves that they, you know, aren’t good or they’re just bad kids,” Zicher said. “We wanted to give them a different narrative for themselves, a different, positive outlook on themselves.”
Dandy and Zicher both have strong college athletics backgrounds. Dandy was a two-time All-American linebacker for Western Kentucky University and Zicher was a track and field athlete competing for Lewis University and Western Illinois.
Zicher and Dandy came up with the idea of starting a track and field team because, they felt, it was the most inclusive sport to get as many third through 11th grade students involved as possible. They also believed starting a track and field team just made the most sense, considering the students' interest in running.
“A lot of our kids actually like to run,” Zicher said. “So, we were like, what if we started a track team and gave them a positive outlook of like, if you want to run, here’s how you run.”
The first hurdle: getting the proper paperwork done.
Dandy is also an assistant football coach at duPont Manual High School, so he knew how daunting of a task it could be having to send out a number of forms.
“The legwork behind getting something like this started, I mean, we probably sent out 40 forms for kids to go home with and the next day and the week coming after that, maybe one kid bought their form in,” Dandy said. “So then it was on Ms. Alexis to get to those houses to get those forms filled out and find different alternatives and getting those forms together.”
That brings us back to the beginning of this story. Zicher driving around determined to not let her and Dandy’s idea of a Waller Track Team fall to the wayside because of forms that weren’t turned in. She knocked on doors and it worked.
“We had to make a few house visits but it’s all worth it when you get to see the kids just happy,” Zicher said.
The first year of the track team, the 2023-24 school year, saw 15 students compete in both indoor and outdoor seasons. The elementary and middle school students were able to compete as the Waller track and field team but the high school students had to compete under the Westside Track Club, due to Kentucky High School Athletic Association (KHSAA) rules.
Once the team got started, Zicher and Dandy noticed an immediate difference in the way the student-athletes were conducting themselves. Dandy started naming a Student-Athlete of the Week during the morning announcements and student-athletes got their picture posted in the school.
“They kind of held themselves to a higher standard,” Zicher said.
One of the best examples of that showed during the season.
“One of our kids, he has an attendance problem and getting to school at all – on time. And we had a track meet one day and he showed up late to school. And we were like, you can’t run in the track meet. You weren’t on time to school,” Dandy said. “That Monday, that next week, we had a track meet, he was on time to school. That was the first time being on time to school all year.”
As a support to the team, the Waller-Williams Family Engagement Committee set aside some funds so the parents could go to the track meets and watch their children perform for free. Zicher and Dandy credits not just the committee, but everyone who was involved in getting the team started.
The importance of having parents show up for the kids made a difference.
“You had people’s grandparents there, you had their families, you had siblings, and I think that meant a lot to our kids,” Zicher said. “Their families go to see their kids being in a positive manner rather than, you know, the school always calling about a type of behavior.”
As the season went on the students got more and more prideful about being on the track team. One student put some track pictures in her Backpack presentation, saying how she identifies as a track student-athlete.
Another student placed in the elementary JCPS meet and wore his medals the next day to school.
“[He] was walking on his tippy toes, super duper excited,” Dandy said.
Two high school students who had a “beef” at the beginning of the school year were hyping each other up as they prepared for an event.
“I even said something to Dandy, I was like, you see them over there right now, hyping each other up? I said, ‘Didn’t they have a beef earlier this year?’ And he just started laughing and said, ‘Yep.’”
Dandy and Zicher say they plan to bring back an indoor and outdoor track team for the 2024-25 school year and are considering adding Esports, bass-fishing, or flag football. Many students had asked about starting up, or in the case of Waller, restarting a basketball team.
“They’re trying to give us some ideas of what they’re interested in, which kind of gives us some hope,” Zicher said. “I’m happy that they feel comfortable enough to tell us what they’re interested in so we can try to help them get them on a good track.”
By Dyuce Woodson