Team Thome runs the race

Cory Swords was so lost in the splendor of it all that he momentarily forgot his status as a Bishop Carroll Catholic High School track coach. He was just one more eye witness.

“I’ve been coaching for a long time, and our program has been blessed with a lot of success, but I think God gave me the grace in that moment to enjoy it, not as their coach, but as a fan of those girls and their family,” said Swords, who is head coach of the Carroll boys’ track team, as well as coach of both the boys’ and girls’ distance runners.

Another BCCHS track coach, Winston Kenton, made a point of finding the girls’ parents, Jarrod and Emily Thome, after the meet. “He said, ‘This was one of the best days of my year,’” Emily recounted. “I was like, ‘Yeah, it was awesome.’”

The basic outline is already pretty compelling: The Golden Eagles’ Thome sisters of Sophia and Olivia – fraternal twin seniors – and Nora and Grace – fraternal twin freshmen – had just won the girls 4×800-meter relay at Andale High School’s annual Paul “Bear” Schmidt Invitational Track meet, which the school hosted on April 2.

But there’s more to it. The story weaves together numerous threads that include not only unexpected aptitudes, sisterly solidarity, and the culture of Carroll’s track and cross-country teams, but also the compelling parallels between – and harmony with – the race and family’s Catholic faith. It also exemplifies perseverance, Swords says, noting that each sister has at one point or another had a ready-made excuse to hang up her running shoes before that April day in Andale. 

“Each of them has had a struggle and could have walked away,” he said. “My wife, Mary Ellen, frequently tells our children ‘Discomfort is not danger.’ In today’s world it seems common to assume if something is uncomfortable – if it doesn’t come easy – that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.”

By contrast, Swords continues, the Thome sisters recognize that discomfort is sometimes merely the price of admission. “Some of the best things in life are hard, they make you uncomfortable, and it’s okay to endure the discomfort of the moment so you can grow,” he said. “If you leave too early, you might miss an abundance of beauty.”

Distance running is an endurance sport, he reflects, which may as well be a flashing neon sign: “Unpleasantness Ahead.” After all, endurance is not a word people associate with sunny beach vacations. “You have to endure tough things, and struggles,” Swords said. 

But the payoff can be worth it, he assures. “If you put beauty into the world, then that beauty is going to be returned,” Swords said. “There’s something unique about this story of four sisters just being themselves, and sharing with others the beauty and love of family.”

First out of the blocks

Emily did not bestow a legacy of competitive running on her daughters. “I never ran; I still don’t,” she said.

Jarrod had been a wrestler, but in adulthood, a career as an industrial engineer hadn’t exactly required elite physical fitness. A few years ago, when confronted with the reality that his oldest daughters were about to enter high school, he decided to start running two or three miles in an effort to get into better shape. Meanwhile, basketball had been Sophia’s main sport during middle school, but she doubted she could make the cut at Carroll. Therefore, a desire to remain physically active soon had her trying it too – even if those beginnings were decidedly humble.   

“I remember when Sophia first said she wanted to run, it was almost as if it was more of a ‘need’ to run,” Jarrod said. “She started just running to the corner and back, which was less than a mile … and she would have to walk some of it. Eventually she asked if she could run with me.”

Could she keep pace?

“I wasn’t running very fast by any means, but I think we were both surprised to find that when she ran with me, she could run without stopping,” he said. “After doing that for a few weeks, I asked how she felt about trying to do the Prairie Fire half-marathon that fall.”

They settled on a training plan and ran early in the mornings before school, sprinkling in longer runs during the weekends. 

“I thought ‘Oh, this will be a good father/daughter experience,’” Emily said. “I didn’t think it was anything she was going to do in high school.”

Father and daughter finished the race together, and Sophia’s 1:54:19 placed her second in the race’s 14-19 age group. “I was proud of her and will always have fond memories of those early days running together,” Jarrod said. “After the race, though, I didn’t really think about it leading to anything else. But some of her friends pointed out that was a pretty good time and she should consider going out for track.”

“I decided, ‘Okay, maybe I can,’” Sophia said. “Then I really got into it.”

By midseason of her freshman year, she was competing with the varsity team, and it wasn’t long before she noticed the extent to which running seemed to be shaping her character and even enhancing her faith. “Taking one second off your time might not seem like it matters, but experience has shown me that God can take anything and use it for a beautiful purpose,” Sophia said. “Running is a way to physically express love for whoever I’m running for on that day. How can I not run when I’ve been given so much goodness that I now have the opportunity to express?”

Jarrod and Emily quickly came to appreciate how BCCHS’ cross-country and track programs strive to strengthen – and elucidate – parallels with their Catholic faith. 

“In order to grow, spiritually or otherwise, you have to do hard things and go to work on yourself,” Jarrod reflects. “This takes on deeper meaning and brings about fulfillment when you orient that work as a gift of self … toward the good of others, rather than selfish motives. They find meaning and joy in their suffering and offer up their races for special intentions. They all pray the rosary after their cross-country races until the last runner finishes and other schools join in. You need fellowship and community in the spiritual life. They have all of that on the team and more.”

According to Swords, meets are one more opportunity for evangelization. “People should recognize something different about the Bishop Carroll team,” he said. “We ask our kids to do simple things like shake the hands of their competitors. We want them to thank the officials, concession stand workers, and all the people who make the meet possible. We have a tradition of cleaning up trash afterwards so we can leave a facility better than we found it. This year at Pratt, one of the groundskeepers thanked us profusely, saying that what 60 kids could do in 10 minutes could have taken him several hours to accomplish. A little later he saw the kids kneel and pray. Maybe he heard a bit of the gospel in that moment.”

Stirred to strive

Olivia played volleyball in middle school, but had no plans to pursue high school sports. Sophia’s track meets during their ninth-grade year were occasions for Olivia to hang out with her sister and other friends. She even slipped onto the field to join members of the team in cheering for their classmates. Olivia loved it – but had no desire to run. 

An experiment reinforced that. 

One sweltering day, Sophia prevailed upon her sister to join her on a three-mile jog.

“It was a really bad decision on my part,” Sophia said.

Olivia had not been building up to such an excursion, so when faced with such a sink-or-swim moment, she sank like a brick. “After we ran a little, she stopped and said, ‘I can’t do this,’” Sophia said. “I was like, ‘Come on, yes you can.’”

Olivia giggles at the absurdity of the moment: “I sat down on the side of the road as she kept saying, ‘You can do it! You can keep going!’ I told her ‘I don’t think you understand. I just don’t want to.’”

But Olivia had enjoyed the team camaraderie and still wanted to be involved, perhaps as a team manager. So as their freshman year wound down, Olivia accompanied Sophia to the after-school cross-country meeting in anticipation of the following season. Since the twins shared a car anyway, she was literally along for the ride, but as Olivia sat in that room listening to Swords address the group, she was moved in spite of herself.

What did the coach say?

“I don’t even remember,” he said. “In those meetings, I just ask God to give me what the kids need to hear … I know enough to get out of the way and let him work.”

According to Olivia, it was the polar opposite of a pep talk about athletic glory.

“Coach Swords talked about the power of suffering and pursuing a goal like Heaven together,” she said. “He talked about the value of doing something hard, even if you’re not very good at it. It was stirring.”

It echoed themes their parents had upheld by word and example. “When Jarrod and I started out – totally broke and raising our young family – life had more natural suffering,” Emily said. “As we got older and more mature, the kids did too, and things got easier. We thought about how, as Christians we don’t necessarily need to beg for suffering, but if we find ourselves comfortable, we might need to look for ways to sacrifice.”

Those dinner table discussions helped prompt Emily to apply for the director’s position at the Diocese of Wichita’s Lord’s Diner, a job she now holds. “We talked about how it is important to attempt hard things, offer them up to the Lord, and pray through it,” she said.

Here was Olivia’s opportunity.

“Our faith gives meaning to our suffering, and running is a way for me to be less passive in my faith.” she said. “I don’t have to run, but it’s an action I can take. We live in a really great country, under great circumstances with fewer natural opportunities for suffering. This is a way to unite myself to others’ suffering, and create opportunities to let God’s grace work in my life.”

That evening at home, she first broke the news to her father.

“I told him ‘Dad, I just made the worst decision,’” Olivia said. “I said ‘I’m going to run cross-country.’”

She started slow, literally. “I was definitely slow at first,” she said. “I have asthma and really bad allergies and thought ‘Oh, this is horrible.’”

Olivia ran C-team at first, but soon began to offer glimpses of things to come, such as qualifying for the Rim Rock Farm Classic Invitational after her first 5K. 

Sophia also qualified for that race, but an iron deficiency had sapped her. Olivia kept her word as she came upon her fatigued sister. “Olivia had said if she was about to pass me on a hill, she would push me up to the top,” Sophia recalled. “Then she did pass me, but she grabbed me and we ran up the hill together. It was awesome.”

A broken oath

Of course, two Thomes does not a relay team make.

When they reached the seventh grade, Nora and Grace had a choice. Kind of. “It was not forced on us, but people seemed to expect us to follow in Sophia and Olivia’s footsteps,” Nora said. 

When Coach Swords learned from the twin Thome sophomores that they had twin seventh-grade sisters running track for St. Peter, Schulte, they imagined Team Thome running the 4×800. Although he did not know it was Emily’s hometown, he often pictured that race taking place in Andale, because he was confident the school’s legendary public address announcer for track meets, Casey Jones, would heighten the experience.

“He’s a lot of fun, and I imagined him saying ‘We’ve got a Thome handing off to another Thome,” Swords said. 

There was a fly in that ointment, though:

“We both kind of hated track,” Nora said.

They remember wilting – and worse – amid the pre-race anticipation. “On those mornings I gagged as I brushed my teeth,” Nora said.

At their initial meet, the nerves were so intense that Grace began to cry as she stepped onto the track for her first race. Instead of ebbing in the seconds before the race, those tears intensified. “I was just weeping there at the line right until the gun went off,” she said. “I ran a mile and then threw up at the end.”

Although Nora and Grace stuck it out that season, they were miserable enough to make a solemn oath to each another: no more track – ever.

Nevertheless, like their sisters, they also enjoyed strong friendships with many of their teammates, and so were persuaded to join St. Peter’s cross-country summer conditioning program to help them prepare for 8th grade volleyball. One thing led to another, and soon they found themselves competing in both sports during that fall. 

“We still got really nervous,” Nora said, “but we also started to like it more.”

But even if their attitudes toward track were thawing, their shared stance toward a prospective Thome 4×800 was a hard pass. “We were in denial and said we’d rather play lacrosse,” Grace said. “At Thanksgiving, when we were still two years away from high school, relatives would say they couldn’t wait for the Thome 4×800. I was like, ‘Nora, I can’t handle this.’”

Emily soon recognized that the younger sisters weren’t just playing coy, either. 

“At one point I told Sophia and Olivia to stop talking about it,” she said. “I told Nora and Grace: ‘Be your own person; you don’t have to be like your sisters.’”

They also didn’t have to be like their father, but having competed in eighth grade cross-country, they asked Jarrod about training for and running with them and a friend, Emma Goertz, in a half-marathon in El Dorado during spring 2025. Despite a constrained training schedule and no knowledge of the course, they set an ambitious goal of finishing in less than two hours. “Race day came and we drove the route,” he said. “We discovered there were some extremely challenging hills.”

Worse still were the chilly, damp, and gusty conditions, he recounts. “Halfway into the course, there was a 1.5 mile stretch with a 100-foot elevation gain, straight into a 20-mph wind with driving rain. It was brutal and was actually snowing by the time we finished,” Jarrod recalled. “But the girls gutted it out and finished with a 1:57:44, finishing third in their age group behind two 19-year-olds.”

That summer, Grace and Nora accepted Sophia and Olivia’s invitation to participate in summer cross-country conditioning. And when the season started, all four Thome girls were on the team.

Whereas young Grace and Nora once resented BCCHS running sports for occupying so much of their older sisters’ time, now the younger sisters were with them in the midst of it all. Of course, there were still steep challenges, such as a nagging injury from the 2025 track season that still bothered Olivia, or the stubborn illness that put an early end to Grace’s cross-country season. 

But as the track season has progressed, the freshmen twins express appreciation for the extent to which the seniors have eased their learning curves, Nora notes, right down to the details of when to don their spikes, eat a sandwich, and even what type to eat. “We’re freshmen who don’t really know anything,” she said. “They’re definitely our leaders and they have been so patient with us.”

“We get to see a different side to them,” Grace said. “We have gotten to know them not only as big sisters, but also as teammates and friends.”

It is much the same for the big sisters to see their younger counterparts in new contexts. At one point, as Grace starts to mention Nora’s “inner dog” emerging during competition, Olivia’s eyes light up and she takes the baton to discuss how her sweet little sister becomes cold-blooded on the track.

“Nora is such a caring person, but when she runs she’s so determined and keeps the same pace no matter what,” she said. “It’s incredible to see that confidence in Nora and Grace. Earlier this year during the cross-country two-mile time trial, Nora came out of nowhere and passed me on the last lap. I thought ‘Well, I just got passed by my little sister, and she’s going so fast.’ Then I started cheering for her.”

Team Thome triumphs

Run fast for your mother,

Run fast for your father, 

Run for your children,

For your sisters and brothers.

That snippet of Florence + the Machine’s 2008 anthem “Dog Days Are Over” is one item that echoes in Emily’s mind as she thinks about that day in Andale. 

“Each of them ran fast for their sisters,” she said. “It was really cool.”

“All four of these girls are incredibly talented runners and that would be just as true if they were from four different families from four different schools,” Swords said. “I knew the team had a good chance of winning, but I didn’t put the relay together to win. I put the relay together so that those girls and their family could have the experience.”

“We told our family about it and the word got around,” Sophia said. “The next thing we know, Great Uncle Marty was showing up.”

“Grandpa Mohr was probably the most excited,” Nora adds. “He kept texting us the day before, saying things like ‘Coach Grandpa says, don’t eat gummy worms this week. It’s race time.’ Grandma was like, ‘Are you guys actually doing the Thome four-by?’ When we said yeah, she said ‘Okay, I gotta go make some phone calls.’”

“It was just a realization that this was going to happen,” Jarrod said. “Of course, we knew it was a special moment for them to share and that brought a real sense of joy along with it, but I just encouraged the girls to have fun with it and not put any pressure on themselves.”

As the race was about to begin, Emily pulled out a phone and began recording and cheering. “When they started pulling away, it was crazy,” she said.

Sophia ran the first leg, followed by Nora, and then Olivia. Swords had tapped Grace as the anchor, but emphasized the team element. 

“I knew she would be a little nervous … so we just talked about how no one should ever blame the loss of a basketball game on whoever misses that last free throw, because there’s 1,000 moments in the game before that one,” he said. “A relay is really about everyone getting the baton around the track as fast as possible.”

When Grace crossed the finish line, Team Thome had first place and a time of 10:00.81.

“Watching it unfold, I just tried to soak it in and be grateful for the moment,” Jarrod said. “Seeing them win, I was just so happy for them, because I knew they were not only running for their team but they were running for each other. And that wouldn’t have changed no matter what place they got, but I think getting the win made it that much sweeter and just speaks to the fact that they poured it all out – for each other.”

“I was definitely choked up, and just really happy they got the opportunity to do that,” Emily added.

“Everybody at that meet got to see something really beautiful,” Swords said. “Four sisters running for each other and using the talents and gifts that God gave them, and clearly doing it out of out of love for each other.”

Swords remained a fan for a bit longer, watching the beaming sisters embrace and celebrate. Later, the coach in him finally awoke. “Looking at their splits afterwards, I said ‘Wow, that was great.’”

“My 800 personal record is from that 4×800,” Nora said.

“Mine too,” said Grace.

“Somebody showed me that it was the second-fastest 4×800 in the state that week, off (first place) by a half-second,” Sophia said. “That was really cool, because we would have won at a lot of other meets too.”

Of course, transcendent as that moment – and this season – have been – time marches on. The two older Thome twins will accompany each other to Benedictine College for school and running sports next year, but the younger ones don’t discount the possibility of an encore.

“Maybe we’ll get a second year of all of us together at Benedictine,” Olivia said.