“The kids are a good group of kids, they work hard, that's all you can ask for,” Carpentier said. “For them to work hard and show up every day and to push themselves and that’s what they’ve been doing.”
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Royal High School will be experiencing changes within its Athletics Department for the upcoming 2021-2022 school year.
One notable change that Royal ISD will be implementing is the replacement of the retiring cross country coach, Robert Weber, with a new coach, David Carpentier.
“When you do something that long, 36 years, you’re going to miss it,” Weber said. “I’m going to miss the kids, I’m going to miss the interaction between the kids, the meets, the workouts, and most of all being around them and trying to make them better,” Weber said.
Carpentier, who is also taking over as the head boys basketball coach, is coming over from Travis High School in Fort Bend and is new to the district.
“The new coach is a basketball coach, and it’ll be his first year as a cross country coach, but I think that he’ll do a good job and that he’ll also bring in some basketball players to this sport,” said Assistant Cross Country Coach Craig Rollins.
Weber or ‘Webdog’, as the student-athletes like to call him, is currently training and helping out as much as he can before he decides to retire.
“We come out here and do our warm-up and show him what we usually do, run a mile, do the active stretching, we do the same routine every day, we don’t change the warm-up routine and then we go straight to our workout,” Weber said. “ We’ve been putting in some mileage, but it’s more intense this month so we go hard one day, easy, hard one day, easy, we try to mix it up, so I try to help coach as much as I can with that, “ Weber said.
Coach Carpentier is anticipating the arrival of the cross country season and from practice, he said that the athletes to look out for are sophomore Miguel Hernandez and junior Vladimir Moreno.
“They’ve been out here working hard every day getting up early,” Coach Carpentier said. ”The goal is just to get better each day so that by the time that the district meet rolls around they perform to the best of their abilities.”
The student-athletes will miss Weber but are looking forward to the season.
“Cross country is a really fun but rigorous sport, and Coach Weber always tells us that it’s the hardest sport out there but that’s why it’s so much fun,” Vladimir said.
While the replacement cross country coach is new to coaching the sport, Weber is confident that he’ll get used to it and enjoy getting to know the students.
“I think he’s going to do a good job, and with him being the head basketball coach, he is very competitive, and I know that he’ll do the same here,” Weber said.
The athletes have been putting in the work and are anxious to see how the cross country season will look.
“The kids are a good group of kids, they work hard, that's all you can ask for,” Carpentier said. “For them to work hard and show up every day and to push themselves and that’s what they’ve been doing.”