By Al Muskewitz
East Alabama Sports Today
Donald Ross. Alistair MacKenzie. A.W. Tillinghast. Pete Dye. They’ve designed some the greatest golf courses in the world. If there’s a Mount Rushmore of cross country course designers, you’d think John Moore ought to be on it.
Moore, the White Plains cross country coach, has found a second calling of sorts as he heads into the twilight of his coaching career. He’s designed five courses and running trails in Calhoun County, including the C5 Course at McClellan that will host the Calhoun County Cross Country Championships — C5, get it – later this month.
“It’s just a hobby,” he said. But it’s clearly a labor of love.
In addition to the McClellan course, his growing list of builds and redesigns include his home 5K Wildcat Trail course at the middle school and trails at the high school and Golden Springs Baptist Church. And he’s consulting on the course being built at Munford, a layout that will feature a 300-yard run through a cornfield.
They just add to the options around the county that include the courses at Pleasant Valley, Oxford Lake and Choccolocco Park where just six years ago there was only one. Alexandria was building one until a pile of road material cut through the route.
“The sport is blowing up in our area,” Moore said. “Next year there will be more local races than ever before … Our local cross country teams won’t have to travel all over the state any more. There will be eight local races to choose from.”
And several of them will have Moore’s, um, footprint on them.
His first effort was a quarter-mile trail at the school in 2015 that he hacked out old-school with hatchets, machetes and a lot of sweat. He’s come into some heavier equipment since and gotten a lot of help in terms of muscle and materials.
Much in the mold of modern-day golf architects Gil Hanse, Tom Doak, the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, Moore is what you’d call a minimalist when it comes to his approach. A runner himself, he tries to incorporate design elements he finds enjoyable in a run, but moving very little earth to connect the dots.
“It’s not a science, it’s just luck, a lot of it,” he said. “You see what natural terrain you already have and go with that. There’s no reason to bring dirt in or take it out unless there’s a swamp or bog there. For the most part you’re going to leave the earth as you found it, just shape it up a little bit and connect the areas you want to be in.
“You want it to be fairly smooth with some uphills and downhills. Nobody wants it to be flat all the time; a little rise and fall is good for you, to break the monotony so it doesn’t feel like three miles of treadmill running.”
He hasn’t had any complaints so far. All his courses offer something for everybody – runners, coaches and spectators.
“John loves to make trails and enjoys watching people enjoy them,” Pleasant Valley coach Brad Hood said. “He’s a producer. I like to ride and run them; I’m a consumer. I’m glad he has the passion and time to make them.”
“I give kudos to Coach Moore,” Anniston coach Lisa Howard-Holland said. “He already has a course and to see him come out here and build a course from scratch just shows you the kind of person he is. He’s the leader of this whole thing. He said he was going to help every step of the way and, boy, he did.”
The C5 course at McClellan debuted two weeks ago with the Bulldog Twilight Invite. The course winds its way through the soccer complex, giving spectators multiple venues to view the action, much like the course at Oxford Lake.
It was built with the idea of giving all the programs in Calhoun County that don’t have their own place a course of their own.
“It sure is nice to have one that’s central to everyone in the county that anybody can use at any time,” Moore said. “I think everyone loved the venue … because they could see their athletes in multiple locations.
“You actually gave me the idea to reroute my home course so that the one- and two-mile would be close together. Since then I’ve been thinking about the logistics of course building and how to make it spectator friendly, coach friend and athlete friendly. I think the Fort McClellan course does that.”
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