El Paso-Gridley’s Melick wins 2025 CSM Girls Cross Country Coach of the Year

El Paso-Gridley cross country head coach Michael Melick started the Titans’ cross country program with his own money 20 years ago. 

That investment is still paying dividends as the Titans put together another successful season behind a balanced core of runners, leading Melick to be named Clutch Sports Media’s 2025 Girls Cross Country Coach of the Year. 

Melick’s Titans finished third at the Class 1A State Finals, the team’s best placement ever at state. Melick also coaches EPG’s boys team, which matched the best-ever feat with a fourth-place finish at state. 

The Titans’ girls team showed incredible balance with its top five runners finishing between 29th and 54th at state, with none of its top seven runners finishing lower than 87th. El Paso-Gridley also won its first sectional title in team history at the Class 1A Elmwood Sectional, squeaking by Elmwood/Brimfield by two points to capture the victory. EPG finished second at the Class 1A Farmington Regional and Heart of Illinois Conference Meet. 

Melick’s tutelage also helped the Titans win the Prairie Central/Pontiac Invite, the Elmwood Invitational and the El Paso-Gridley Invitational, a unique and popular event at EPG’s home course Furrow Farms. 

His squad featured four CSM All-Area selections in Sophie Hinthorne, Kiley Knapp, Haven Miller and Caroline Wettstein. Check out CSM’s 2025 Girls Cross Country All-Area team here.

Hear more from Melick about this past season and his career in our interview with him below. Some responses have been minimally edited for clarity.

What have you been able to reflect on in the days since the season has ended? 

“We pretty much immediately turned to get down our notes on what we did that seemed to work, so that we can try to keep that and then what areas might we have done better at so that's kind of the instant reflection. I've already had my meeting with the AD about goals for next year and things like that and the Monday after state, we started our winter running club so we’re right back at it.”

In your mind, what made the team so special this year?

“What I love that made the girls team special was that the order of finish didn't matter to our girls. Whether she was a one or a five on any given day, every girl wanted every girl to do well. Sometimes with teams you have intra-squad competition for spots and while we were competitive to earn a spot on the varsity lineup, our biggest competition remained the other schools so we were unified in that we wanted to succeed as a team. There was not a conversation, really, among our athletes about going and earning individual all-state honors because, yes, that was a possibility, but that was not a focus of anyone. They wanted team success and I think that's what made us special is that we knew that our success depended almost entirely on team success.”

“We don't separate the coaching of our girls and boys programs, and we do a lot of our training and workouts together, but the personnel and the attitudes of the teams are somewhat different. For the guys, we had a really close pack in training with our one through four so we were able to set workouts for those four pretty even. Their strength was kind of their tight bond, I think we had a 39-second gap between our one and five at state, which is pretty decent. I think our girls actually might have matched that but the guys train together more closely.”

“The girls are kind of everywhere in their training, because we had a couple girls, Caroline [Wettstein] and Sophie [Hinthorne] and Myli [Ehrhardt], [who] have been through a lot of injuries in the prior three years, so we were trying something a little different this year where they were actually cross training more days per week.  We kept their weekly mileage for Caroline and Myli in the low 20s. There were some weeks they didn't even get 20 miles of running, which is pretty unheard of for some of the programs. But we were doing that to try and keep them healthier later in the season. We thought, if we could preemptively manage that, then maybe they could get to the state meet feeling happier and healthier and it seemed to work. Our top five this year was the exact same top five as last year, just in a slightly different order, sure, where they brought all their times down as an average.”

What’s your coaching background? 

“I’ve just been at EPG. I started the program here [in 2005], paid for it myself for the first couple years out of my pocket because it wasn't a school sport but we had had individual athletes before.”

What helps keep you going?

“I started as a runner, I think I ran my first 5K when I was nine years old. Someone dared me to do the Danvers Days 5K so I did it. I think I got last in my age group, but they still gave me a trophy. And I'm like, ‘Hey, I'm pretty good at this,’ and it just got me hooked. Then I got started running the local 5K circuit, and then ran cross country and I just love the fact that whatever you put in is what you're going to get out. If I can communicate that lesson to these students, not just in cross country but in life, going through hard work will earn you rewards. It might not be like all-state honors, but you will be faster than you were before. You will be a better person than you were before, and that makes it worth it.”

Aside from winning, what’s a fun memory that you’ve had from this past season? 

“We moved our dance party this year to a new venue, so three years ago, we started doing a dance party the night of the state meet which is kind of our end-of-year awards banquet/dance party. Besides running, we had some good duets. We have a practice thing where if two people show up wearing the same shirt, they have to sing a duet and we had some good ones this year. This year we actually had one where there were four of them, so they did a whole barbershop [quartet]. There's lots of memories made along the way, we had some good pasta parties. My daughter was a member of our team for four years, but she graduated. She's up in Wisconsin for college now and she came back and the girls had a pasta party for her when she came back and those kinds of things, the team-bonding activities are the things that really they're going to remember more than any workout or meet.”

What’s a piece of coaching advice you’d give?

“I think all the cliché mantras that go around, consistency is key, that one is absolutely true. Discipline over motivation, that's one that we try to emphasize. You're never going to be motivated to get up in the summer and go run, but if you're disciplined then, then you'll do it, Then Al Carius’ saying of run for fun and personal bests. I think that just keeps it real. There's going to be, I don't know how many participants in Illinois high school cross country. It's probably several thousand and there will be six individual state champions. But that doesn't mean that the other 5,000 kids don't get something out of it. So I guess the message is just to run for fun. Run for your teammates and run to be better than you were the day before.”