Sometime this past summer, seniors Dylan Choura, Henry Schwarze, and Jakob Terpstra loved taking trips to the local Forest Hills Foods for chocolate milk. Not just any chocolate milk: TruMoo. That’s when they thought of this unique idea: their own track club called the Chocolate Milk Chuggers.
Junior Jack Monterusso has been running for the school with Henry, Dylan, and Jakob for the past few years. As they became closer friends, he began hearing stories about the many brief shopping trips for chocolate milk and heard about their upcoming idea.
“The trio, which is Henry, Dylan, and Jakob, went to Forest Hills Foods to drink chocolate milk all the time,” Jack said. “I heard that they had this kind of stupid idea, and they were asking around to see if anybody actually wanted to do it. It was kind of hard not to hear about [Chuggers] because I’m with these guys basically all day long.”
While Chuggers started because of a few Forest Hills Foods runs, Henry, Jakob, and Dylan put quite a bit of work into starting it up. As they had more and more ideas, they started thinking it could actually become something. When it became time for the seniors to paint their parking spots, the three of them had to think of the perfect design. That’s when they thought of TruMoo. It was an easier design and also was associated with their new favorite beverage: chocolate milk. After about eight hours of painting, they completed their design and posted it on their recently developed Chuggers Instagram account.
After posting the photos on their Instagram, TruMoo reached out to see if they could start posting Chuggers’ posts on the TruMoo page. After the Chuggers Instagram reached out to TruMoo about a partnership, they told them that they’d love to have a partnership.
In addition to designing their parking spots, they also designed their very own merch. They have a sweatshirt and also a jersey that everyone on the team is required to wear. To get the merch, one must go to chuggers.club to fill out a form. The back of the sweatshirt has a customizable option available when filling out the form to add a nickname or name to it.
“Almost all track teams have merch to wear on meet days, so it would make our club more official if we also had our own,” Henry said. “It also creates a sense of community within the team if we’re all wearing the same thing at school. Running a track club is also very expensive, so selling things such as merch helps us run it.”
The most high-demand item on the website is their incredibly high-quality sweatshirts. For the front of the sweatshirts, Jakob was hoping to have some of TruMoo’s aspects to it. That’s why he came up with a cow design that truly showed who the Chuggers were. On the back, they were hoping to have a “school sports” type of merch but also wanted it to have something different about it. That’s why they decided to make it a customizable name on the back instead of just someone’s first or last name. Also, since they’re official partners of TruMoo, they were able to add the words “Powered by TruMoo” on the back of the sweatshirts.
Not only are they powered by TruMoo, but also by each other through their incredible community of runners. There are a lot of positive things about being on a pretty much year-round track team. Not only is it a no-pressure zone, it’s fun to get to know the rest of the team.
“I hate winter training by myself, and I wanted some chances to run on the indoor track because I’ve never run on an indoor track before,” Jack said. “All of my friends are doing it, and there’s no reason not to join the chuggers. I like [Chuggers] because it’s pretty much cross country 2.0. It’s basically all of the cross country and track guys, and we all get to get together before track season even starts.”
The team community is a pretty close-knit group since it’s mainly people from the Ranger cross country and track teams. Because of that, most of them were already friends before Chuggers had even started. Since they were already pretty close, Chuggers became even more fun for the rest of the team. Even the newcomers got to know the rest of the team pretty quickly, so they’re enjoying it just as much as the others.
“[The community of the team] is pretty vibrant,” Jakob said. “Everybody’s happy about being on the team, and it’s actually something different. [Usually] nobody ever does anything in the winter, and they’re kind of just on their own [for training].”
Another great aspect of Chuggers is the variety of runners. There are about 20 runners on the team, and every single one of them has been running for a different amount of time and have run with different teams. Some are newcomers, some have been running all of high school, and some have only been running for a year or two. Luckily, now they have Chuggers in common. While senior Alex Dixon loved being a part of the football team the past four years, he’s also been looking forward to track season. That’s why he loves Chuggers.
“Me being a sprinter on the team, I don’t really run as much as [the rest of the team does],” Dixon said. “I still like to run because we’re a tight group of guys. I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else. Chuggers for life.”
Because of the incredible company that they’re surrounded with at every event and practice, each person on the team looks forward to seeing their teammates throughout the week. They have practice every Wednesday at multiple different locations. Chuggers has also already done two events as a team so far, such as this year’s annual Turkey Trot in Grand Rapids, and they’ve also raced at GVSU MITS #1. They’re going to end up racing at many more different events throughout the year, which can be found listed on their website. Next year, the seniors are hoping to pass Chuggers on to the current juniors of FHC, and they’re hoping it’ll continue being a tight-knit community as it gets passed on.
“We all know each other because we’ve run a lot together in cross country,” Jack said. “We’re all good friends, and we’re all uniting on a pretty stupid idea.”
This story was originally published on The Central Trend on December 13, 2024.
