Apr. 6—”You can run any pace you want,” fourth grade teacher Melanie Ferrara told the 23 girls gathered around her, behind Valleyview Elementary in Oneonta on Tuesday afternoon. Most of the girls took off as fast as they could; by the end of two laps many were struggling.

Girls on the Run, an after-school program for girls in third to fifth grade, started this week with 325 girls at 18 schools in the region. The girls train with coaches for about 90 minutes twice a week to build social, emotional and physical skills.

As the girls at Valleyview finished their first laps, they gathered in the shade. “How many of you found that harder than you thought?” Ferrara asked. Most of the girls raised their hands. “Some of you started out at a rock star pace. It’s hard to keep that up.” She told them to try jogging the next lap. “You may feel like a turtle, but that’s ok.”

“We say we inspire girls to be joyful and healthy, by increasing their physical activity, but there’s also social and emotional learning components that we use [in] the curriculum,” said Heather Morse, program director for the region, during a phone call on April 5. It’s this integration that makes the program unique, she said.

The eight-week program ends with a 5K run for the girls and the community. This year it is scheduled for June 5 in Oneonta, at the Sixth Ward athletic fields off River Street. The run is not timed; there are no winners — or rather, everyone wins, Morse said.

“We really focus on the girls doing their best and being encouraging to their teammates. And we actually try not to even call it a race, we call it a 5K event. Everybody gets a bib that has the number one on it,” she said.

“One of the main cornerstones of our program is … strength in connectedness, and how ironic for the time we’re living in now. You know that the girls really, really need connection,” according to Morse. “There’s a lot of mental health issues going on, kids are feeling isolated. That’s having these really deep effects for these kids. And so programs like this, that are getting kids together in groups, they’re being physically active, are sort of counteracting some of that isolation.”

Morse previously worked as a coach for Girls on the Run in Oneonta, and said that she appreciated seeing how girls from different social cliques “coalesced into this one team.”

When she sees her former runners, now high school students, “they still come up and hug me when they see me. If you’re getting hugs from teenagers in public, you’ve probably made an impact in a good way,” she said.

“We’re really focusing on your personal best,” she said. Some girls might run 50 laps while others run six. “All we’re looking for is self-mastery, right? You know, just doing your best, making strides every day, setting goals.” She wants to see girls get out of the mindset that ‘I’m not athletic,’ she said. She herself was not a runner when she volunteered as a coach — “I became runner after. Because I liked it so much.”

“No one is going to have a failure, because your whole team is going to be here for you,” Ferrara told the girls at Valleyview during their first practice. Not everyone seemed convinced yet. “I think I made a mistake signing up,” one girl said as she slowly jogged past the start of lap four. Then as she rounded the last corner, a group of boys on the playground cheered her on. She smiled and kept running.

Mike Forster Rothbart, staff writer, can be reached at mforsterrothbart@thedailystar.com or 607-441-7213.