Six years ago, Lucy Gay wrapped up an outstanding cross country career at Wellsville-Middletown High School, competing at the state meet four times.

This fall, Gay is back with the program. This time, she is the new head coach.

“I’m really excited,” said Gay, who is coaching a sport for the first time. “I love cross country. It was my favorite. I loved the community part of it. Now, I’m getting to coach other kids and be a coach. It’s kind of surreal.”

Gay is W-M’s third coach in three seasons. She replaced Skyler Durham, who coached the team for one year. The Tigers were coached by John Slovensky for many years before he retired after the 2024-25 school year.

“I knew it would come up last year and I put some interest in it last year,” Gay said. “The other guy got it. Then, I was like, ‘Well, it was kind of worked out. It was God’s way of saying that my kids were too little.’ Now, my kids are a year older. When it came back up for opening this year, I was like, ‘Alright, let’s do it.’ So I contacted (W-M activities director) Mr. O (Kevin Oligschlaeger) and let him know of my interest.”

Gay – whose maiden name is Schnitker – graduated from W-M in 2020. When she was a freshman, she helped the W-M girls qualify for the Class 1 state meet as a team. She competed at state as an individual for the next three years. In her senior year, she ended her career with a season-best time of 23:32.5 at state.

Gay said she enjoyed working with Slovensky during her cross country career.

“Coach Slovensky had quite the legacy to build up,” she said. “I really admired his coaching style. That’s kind of what I grew up with because he was there the entire time when I was an athlete.”

While at W-M, Gay also had an outstanding FFA career that included receiving an American FFA degree in 2021. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2023 with a Bachelor’s degree in agricultural education.
Now, Gay co-owns a landscape company called L&J Earthmoving in Middletown with her husband Jace. It specializes in lakes, waterways, terraces, drain management, brush clearing and building sites.

Gay said after she got hired as the new cross country coach, she immediately did some recruiting.

“I’ve been a graduate for six years now and a lot of the kids I knew have graduated, so there are a lot of new faces,” Gay said. “So I feel like I have to learn a lot of families that go to school. I had Mr. Oligschlaeger and (W-M Superintendent) Mrs. (Tiffany) Gosseen posting on social media for me to try to get out there. Then, I went to the county fair to try to drum up some interest.”

Gay has four runners on the high school team and three on the junior high squad, all of the runners are boys. Silas Jones, Zeke Bradley, Lucas Spiers and Luke Nelson make up the high school team and Reed Nelson, Asher Lehnen and Brody Lehnen are the runners on the junior high team.

Jones, Spiers and Bradley – all sophomores – are back from last year’s team. Jones was the Tigers’ top performer for most of the 2025 season. He had a 25th-place finish at the Wellsville-Middletown Invitational.

The Tigers start their season on Sept. 8 at the Van-Far Invitational.