By Sarah Longstreet

The gun fires, and the fastest teenage feet in the country dash full speed toward the finish line. The 12th annual Nike Indoor Nationals took place at the Reggie Lewis Center in Roxbury March 12-14, when all of the fastest high school runners gathered to compete to be a national champion.

College scouts loomed in the packed arena to watch both the running and field events, blending in with numerous parents, coaches and fans.

While some of the runners were merely high school freshmen at age 14, many of the runners are high school seniors who have planned their futures around track.

Kathryn Fanning, the only senior member of the girls’ 4×800 meter champion relay team from Manlius, N.Y, plans to attend the University of Albany in the fall as a member of the track team.

But track is unlike many other American sports. The aspiration of getting drafted into the NFL as a football player or being an NBA or Major League Baseball star as a football or baseball player does not translate. There is no comparable professional track league.

Bill Aris, coach of the Fayetteville-Manlius High School track team in the Syracuse, N.Y. area and no stranger to Nike National championships, is well aware of that.

All of the athletes from his team who attended the championships at the Lewis Center brought home gold: The girls’ 4×800 meter relay won by eight whole seconds, and the boys’ mile runner, Alex Hatz, broke both the meet record and the state record, finishing in a little more than four minutes.

Aris also has had multiple winning teams at the Nike Outdoor Nationals. The girls’ cross-country team he coaches has been defending champion the past three years.

Aris said that “high school is just another point on the continuum.”

Although Aris is not a college coach, he and his son and assistant coach, John Aris, have co-founded a program they have been working on for some time for “selected high-goal-achieving post-collegiate runners.”

Bill Aris said he coaches high school athletes to set them up for “an eight- to 10-year development plan,” leading him and his son to develop the program.

The program the Arises have been working on they named the Stotan Racing Club, after their former high school boys’ champion cross-country team from 2004. The team was named Stotan as a combination of the words “stoic” and “spartan.”

Bill Aris said he and his son take a “complete, comprehensive approach” in developing their former high-school runners after college, and are expanding their program to runners not originally from Fayetteville-Manlius.

Nike has recently jumped on board and agreed to sponsor Stotan Racing, a big accomplishment for the Arises. Bill Aris is a former Fayetteville-Manlius High School full-time staff member, but now devotes his time to coaching all day for Stotan Racing Club and the high school team.

Aris said that although winning events at nationals is a topnotch accomplishment, his overall goal is not winning but “pursuing excellence.”

The Arises are coaching their first female member of the Stotan Racing Club, Laurel Burdick. Burdick is a former Fayetteville-Manlius High School athlete who ran as an All-American on the Boston College team.

The Arises are coaching Burdick for the upcoming Boston Marathon, hoping for results that will help Burdick qualify for the Olympic trials.

Andrew McCann, a senior at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a Fayetteville-Manlius graduate, is also planning to join the Stotan Racing Club after graduating from UMass in the spring.

The Stotan Racing Club Web site is being developed and will be online in the near future at www.stotanracing.com.

Sarah Longstreet is an undergraduate student in the Northeastern University School of Journalism. She is a former member of the Fayetteville-Manlius High School track team.