Sedona Red Rock High School will have a fourth varsity sport this fall, but it is not at all a new one.

The cross country team is making a comeback after a one-year hiatus in 2016 after Athletic Director Tom Miller recently named 2016 Red Rock graduate Wyatt Stevenson as head coach.

“I kind of had those two options, either go back and run some more, or come back, work a little bit and hopefully get that job to be the head cross country coach,” Stevenson said. “Something inside of me said ‘Hey your teammates are still there. I crossed the finish line already and they’re not finished yet.’”

Stevenson, who will turn 20 just before the season starts, took the job for a special reason. After hearing about the team’s disappearance last year, he wanted to give his former teammates a chance to finish out their Scorpions careers and give new life to the program.

“In college I heard there was no team and that hurt me because of my teammates here,” Stevenson said. “I want them to have the same opportunity as [I did].”

Where he lacks in coaching experience he makes up for in athletic experience.

One of his biggest prep accomplishments was taking first out of 285 participants in the small schools division at the eighth annual Desert Twilight race in 2015.

That same season he took 14th at the Arizona Interscholastic Association Cross Country Division IV state meet.

He has one collegiate season under his belt, albeit as a redshirt at Arizona Christian University in 2016, and has broken the 4-minute mile.

As a Scorpions athlete, Stevenson also played basketball and even tried swimming at the start of his junior year. After a week, he knew that his real place was out on the grass and not in the water.

He plans to apply training methods learned while at ACU and in high school on the Scorpions runners, and he will do the training right along with them.

Stevenson does not see his youth as a disadvantage from a coaching standpoint, rather he sees it as a benefit.

“I think it’s definitely going to be an advantage for me because I’m so close in age,” Stevenson said. “I can relate to [them] with what they’re dealing with in school … I had times when I didn’t want to do school.

“We’ve all worked together before so they already know what my goals are [now] and knew what my goals were when I was a runner, and now they’re going to know what goals they have for themselves.”

The job became his just a couple weeks before the end of the school year, lending him little time to spread the word around campus and attract potential athletes for the upcoming season.

So far he has seven on the roster; six are boys. Five are needed to have a team.

That was his first goal, already checked off the to-do list.

The next one is to begin attracting younger athletes from the high school and the third is to bring in incoming freshmen.

But most of all, he wants the team to have a strong bond.

“I’ve been a family-based person so I want a family-based team,” Stevenson said. “If there’s one little crack in the chain then the whole team’s not going to make it. That team has to be a unified, strong team as well.”

To help create that atmosphere, Stevenson will turn to those older runners that he once raced alongside. Not only will they be leaned on for their experience out on the course, but also for their leadership.

He said that for now the team is a mix of freshmen and seniors, but no matter the age it will be difficult for all to make up for lost time.

“A huge thing is getting these kids back into it,” Stevenson said. “Once you take a year off of cross country it’s easy to get into a different mindset.”

If all goes well and the team takes off, he hopes to have a separate girls team as well.