CHASING STORMS

There’s Scout Storms, the teen. Then there’s Scout Storms, the athlete.

The teen, who’s a dual citizen (UK, USA), is soft-spoken, humble, Miss Manners-polite, and she’d rather talk about her teammates than herself on any day of the week that ends in “y.”

“Scout,” BHS cross country coach Deb Revolta says, “is as fun-loving as they come, our spark of energy, the teammate in charge of the music played at practices and on bus trips. She’s always carrying her portable speaker around. She’s got that personality that makes her teammates laugh and relax. In a punishing sport like cross country, it certainly helps to be around someone fun on days we practice and on days we race. But, once that starter’s gun at a race goes off, Scout is all business.”

The athlete—a star cross country/track runner—is fiercely competitive, trains relentlessly, has Alps-high goals (a D-1 college scholarship, a professional runner’s contract), and she’s tougher than a ranked UFC fighter.

How tough?

Two years during the track and field season, Storms was running the 1,600-meter when she incurred a broken navicular bone in her right foot at the 800-meter mark. She shrugged off the pain and then completed the back half of the race.

Last autumn, she put that toughness to the test and became the first BHS Filly to win an Illinois High School Association (IHSA) Cross Country State Championship by clocking a program-best three-mile time of 16:38.46 at Detweiller Park in Peoria. Storms won by a tad more than four seconds. Her victory and her comrades’ strong performance resulted in a third-place win for the BHS team.

“I was very tired after the finish,” recalls Storms, who lost only one race last fall. “In shock, too. It felt like a culmination of a lot of things. I remember looking up and seeing my happy teammates and others running toward me. The first to greet me was my sister (eighth-grader Georgia), who was wearing a horse costume.”

Storms arrived stateside with her sister and parents, Abigail and John, when she was a first-grader. Mom and Dad encouraged their daughters to try multiple sports. Storms chose cross country, softball, and field hockey. She excelled at the latter, playing attack as a freshman and sophomore for the nationally ranked Windy City Field Hockey club team.

As a freshman on the BHS varsity cross country team, she ran away from everybody else at the Wheeling Cross Country Invitational. Storms, with about 400 meters left in the 2021 race, did not expect to hear only her spikes pounding the course and the occasional fallen leaf.

But competitor that she is, a healthy lead couldn’t slow Storms down. “I thought, ‘Might as well keep running hard,’” Storms says. “When I won, I was surprised. Later I thought, ‘Maybe I’m OK at this.’”

“OK at this” is an understatement for a runner who last Thanksgiving weekend traveled to Liverpool, England and nearly made the UK’s national U-20 women’s cross country team. “Ok at this” is an understatement for a runner whose podium moments include an individual bronze medal and a team silver medal at the 2023 IHSA State Track & Field Championships.

“Scout never backs down from a challenge,” Revolta says. “It’s who she is; it’s how she’s wired. She enters every race with the same mindset—‘I can run with anybody.’”

Storms said she didn’t truly start enjoying cross country until the sixth grade. What she’s sure of today: her relationship with running has never been stronger.

“I love the everyday grind of cross country, putting in the work and doing everything I can to get better at it,” says Storms, whose frame recently shot up from 5 foot to 5 foot 7 inches over 18 months. “But what I love just as much is getting to run with my favorite people after school.

“It’s an individual and a team sport,” the consummate teen athlete adds.