ACE Grad Launches Non-Profit to Make Cross Country More Accessible

How can we make education more inclusive? For Andrew Brimeyer (ACE 22, Dallas), this question matters in and outside of the classroom. In addition to teaching middle school language arts at Annunciation Catholic School in Denver, Andrew also coaches the cross country team. Over the course of the almost five years that he’s been teaching and coaching at Annunciation, he’s noticed that cross country isn’t as inclusive as he’d like it to be.

“Cross country is a sport that should be more inclusive than it is,” Andrew says. “One of the reasons that students in urban schools aren’t involved with cross country is that there often isn’t someone to coach or that students aren’t exposed to the sport from a young age.”

Since Andrew started teaching at Annunciation in 2017, he’s been working to build up the cross country program. “When I started teaching here, there were probably 5-10 kids who did cross country in a given year, and most other kids didn’t know what it was,” Andrew says. “Over the past several years, we’ve been able to increase our numbers to about 30 students on a regular basis.”

Not only did the number of students who were participating in cross country increase, but Andrew also witnessed an increase in competitive success. Three students placed in the top five at a meet with over 150 runners. In seeing how students at Annunciation were participating in cross country and noticing that other schools were not necessarily experiencing the same thing, Andrew developed an idea for a non-profit after-school program, Denver Urban XC.

The inspiration for Denver Urban XC came from Andrew’s own experiences running and coaching cross country. “Denver Urban XC came out of recognizing that we have a great thing going at Annunciation,” Andrew said. “We’ve got kids who are getting involved in the sport, staying fit and active. I thought, ‘How can we expand this to other kids in the area?’”

Through Denver Urban XC, Andrew runs summer programs for students, trains them during the fall, and also does some winter and spring training. He was doing this informally over the past few years, and he has used this year as “year zero” for Denver Urban XC. In order to get the program off the ground, he spoke with Ben Allison, the director of Denver City Lax, to figure out what his first steps should be.

“A lot of the work I did this past summer was developing a plan for my first steps and reaching out to students from different schools,” Andrew says. “We were able to get 40 new kids to run with us this year, including Annunciation kids, and they represent eight or nine different schools around the Denver area.

“For a lot of kids, either their schools didn’t have a cross country program or if they did, they were only able to run two or three meets a year,” Andrew says. “We were able to supplement what students had at their own schools with what we were doing and get kids involved in more meets. This year, we were able to take about 20 students to the state meet.”

Moving forward, Andrew’s dream is to continue providing more opportunities for students to participate in cross country. “The dream is to make sure that nothing gets in the way of opportunities,” says Andrew. “One of the biggest things I’ve learned this year is that if you seek out help, people will be there to support you.”

If you’d like to learn more about Denver Urban XC or provide support, you can find Denver Urban XC on the platforms below. Donations support the program by helping to provide running shoes, gear, and other training expenses. 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/denverurbanxc