For years Avery Lilly thought her path to athletic participation at the collegiate level was through basketball.
Then she ran cross county and realized she was good at it. Good enough to keep running along that path.
Lilly signed her NLI to run cross country and track at Concord University in the fall Monday, March 31 at Summers County High School.
The soon-to-be Bobcat grad had found success on the hardwood, helping Summers County to a pair of state tournament appearances in 2022 and ’23 with the latter squad advancing all the way to the Class AA title game.
Dedicating years of her life to specialized basketball training, she assumed that’s where her finish line would be.
“It has always been a dream of mine to go and play college basketball and it motivated me to do a lot of off-season work,” Lilly said. “But when I had the opportunity to do so, and I could choose between trying to do both or choosing between the two sports it really came down to what I feel best doing and while I love basketball, for me, it’s always been something very difficult to feel good about myself. I feel like it’s a team sport so your contribution in a game might not always show on the stat sheet. When I was running, it’s more where I could compare times with my times a month ago and say, ‘OK I am getting better, this is working or this isn’t working, I can try something else,’ as a very analytical person.
“I feel really content and happy when I run, even to the point where you know playing basketball you wanna be the best player player on the court at all times you know it’s at least what you wanna tell yourself you want to fight to be the best and with running it’s a good thing to be in an environment where you’re one of the worst ones because being around those better runners is gonna help you improve as a runner yourself. With basketball, there’s just such an in there with running I found such community with other runners and it’s just been really surprising. But I love it and I’m really excited to train for the first time as a runner instead of a multi-sport athlete or basketball player who is just getting started doing running as conditioning.”
Fittingly, the Concord Invitational this past year is where she initially broke a school record in fastest time in cross country.
Around that time is when she started to consider a change.
“I had never considered running collegiately until this past cross country season,” Lilly said. “I really shocked myself with what I was able to accomplish. I do feel like I was able to run faster than I thought I would but over the summer, even before my senior year, I was running and I was conditioning. I was putting in the work to be successful but to actually go and be able to improve that much in a short period of time and then only really begin to compete and hang in there really shocked me. And I realized I really loved this. I really like doing this and I feel like I’ve got such a ceiling to work with.”
Lilly’s athletic focus will be primarily on cross country but in the track realm she’s not settled in. She’ll take the same approach that made her successful at cross country.
“Right now it’s really a ‘try everything’ mentality,” Lilly said. “I’ve been competing and trying. I think I’ll probably fall somewhere between mid-distance and distance. I think I could go to college and be like an 800- or 1600-meter runner or I could easily go and they decide to put me on something like 5K or the 10k and I could be successful at that.”
On the school side the standout already has an idea of what she wants to study.
“I love school,” Lilly said. “I’ve love school my whole life. I really like learning. I feel like I’m a very intrinsically motivated student. I love to pursue things that I’m interested in so me, I’ve had an interest for about a few years now in physical therapy and after the experience, I’ve job-shadowed a little bit, I’m really wanting to pursue physical therapy.
“Concord has a great pre-physical therapy program and really strong stem majors so I’m gonna go with science, pre-physical therapy with the goal eventually graduating from Concord and applying for physical therapy school at another institution. It could be Marshall, it could be WVU, could be Radford. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there but right now that’s the direction I’m leaning.”
