BY ANDREW BAILEY
BG Independent News Correspondent
Girls on the Run of Northwest Ohio strives to help over 1,000 girls build confidence and achieve their goals, while training for a 5K marathon.
It consists of three different programs: one for third to fifth grade, one for sixth to eighth grade, and a coaching opportunity for high schoolers.
The third to fifth grade program — called Girls on the Run — is their bread-and-butter program, GOTR Northwest Ohio Executive Director Lisa Krebs said.
It’s 10 weeks of running-based physical activity and skill development exercises focused on self-care and teaching girls that the sky is the limit. It culminates in that season’s 5K, where the girls run at their own pace with support from their peers.
“Every girl who participates is a winner,” Krebs said.
As a chapter of the national GOTR organization, they have girls from about 70 schools in Defiance, Erie, Fulton, Hancock, Henry, Huron, Lucas, Ottawa, Paulding, Putnam, Sandusky, Seneca, Williams, and Wood counties.
Each school has its own team, with two to four volunteer coaches to lead, and the high school junior coaches to help out.
“We have girls from every walk of life, but they’re all there to learn wellness and realize all the potential they have,” Krebs said.
The size they have now is a far cry from their founding in 2012. They operated in Lucas and Wood County at first, with 22 girls from two schools. It wasn’t long before neighboring counties caught wind of the program, and Krebs saw the need to expand.
“So, we looked at the map. What’s Northwest Ohio? How many counties can we serve? And we saw that if implemented correctly, Girls on the Run could cover a ton more counties,” she said.
Their sixth to eighth grade program — Heart & Sole — was introduced a few years ago. It dives deeper into emotional and physical health and “considers the whole girl — body, brain, heart, spirit and social connection.”
Each program follows a curriculum from the GOTR national organization, and the volunteer coaches, including the high school girls, use the guidelines “to meet the girls where they are” in their respective programs.
The third to fifth grade curriculum follows a tighter structure, planned down to 10- to 15-minute intervals. The Heart & Sole program is more open-ended. The girls can lead discussions and personalize their experience to fit their needs more.
Each lesson in the training follows a step-by-step process to teach a specific lesson, while incorporating physical activity. They begin by reviewing the previous session, then do the workout, and finish by cooling down and processing what they learned.
Krebs used one lesson as an example: Stop and Take a Breather. It centers around taking time to breathe and think, instead of rushing from one thing to another. It starts with a relay, where they yell out the steps to breathe, think, and respond to a situation. Then, they do laps, stopping after each to talk to a partner about a time in their life they could have used those steps. Then, they finish by talking about the lesson again, and discussing how they can apply in their life going forward.
The 10 weeks of the program are split into three topics. In the first section they learn about themselves, the second section they learn how to be a team, and the third section they learn how to be an active community member, while planning and executing a team service project as well.
The service project is one of the hardest lessons to teach, because the girls have to learn how to compromise, Krebs said.
“The coaches have to funnel their ideas and teach the girls what’s reasonable and what isn’t. These girls are dreamers and have amazing ideas for the service project, but they need to learn what a manageable goal to set for themselves is,” she said.
“Watching that lesson where they decide their service project is a great microcosm of the whole program, because it encompasses everything they’ve been taught so far.”
Both programs participate in the same 5K organized by GOTR, and the elementary school girls run with a “running buddy” — an adult in their life, or if they don’t have one, GOTR provides one.
The sense of victory each girl feels after completing the 5K is one of the best parts of the entire program, Krebs said.
“After watching where the girls start from and where they end up, seeing them finish the marathon is incredible. They grow so much over those 10 weeks, and once they finish the 5K, it can be one of the greatest moments in a young girl’s life. It’s a perfect way for them to realize their own potential and what themselves and each other are capable of,” she said.
