Hello Rome Area High School Cross Country Coaches,

The River City Bank Rome Half Marathon, Half Marathon Relay and 5k is looking for racers and volunteers. This race is proud to support our local high school cross country programs. The more participants in the race means the more proceeds we can donate! Please encourage your athletes to sign up to race. This year the race date is Saturday, December 5 (full details can be found at this site: One notable change is that the race start and finish will now be at the Rome Braves Stadium in the east side parking lot. Also, the GoGoRunning All Area Cross Country Banquet will be held on Friday, December 4th, which has honored outstanding local runners and coaches for the past three years.

Perhaps the biggest news about this year’s River City Bank Rome Half Marathon is that Olympic Marathoner Ryan Hall will Headline Rome All-Area Championship Banquet Start the & Rome Half Marathon. Ryan will speak at the Banquet and do a clinic for athletes, coaches, and parents on Friday Dec 4th. Detail for the Banquet can be found here.

We hope to have 200+ people volunteering on the day of the race. Only schools that are able to provide volunteers for race day (or day before with course set-up and packet pick-up) will be eligible to receive a donation to their cross country program. The more volunteers your school can provide, the larger donation check your XC program will receive. On Thursday, Nov 12 at 5:30pm there will be a free dinner meeting for allour volunteer leadership at Bella Roma. This dinner meeting is only for the person who is heading up recruiting volunteers, not the volunteers themselves. Please save that date and plan to come!Unless you have assigned this responsibility to another adult, coach you are the volunteer leader for your school. We ask that you have a working list of who your volunteers will be by the date of this dinner. You will find out many important volunteer details at this dinner: volunteer stations, time commitment, swag, dates for assignment pick-up, etc..

Ideas of who to recruit as your volunteers: parents of your athletes, teachers and staff at your school, runners that do not plan on racing, track athletes that want to cheer on the distance runners from their school, school clubs that need community service hours. No children under high school age will be eligible to volunteer. Please feel free to copy this info letter to hand out to people that you want to volunteer.

We truly look forward to this event and we are excited to donate to and support our local young runners. Please respond to this email to let me know that you have received and read through this information and to RSVP for the dinner on Nov 12. Also, contact me if you have any questions at

Thanks,

Karmen Stephenson