KAUST Schools offers a variety of co-curricular activities for students ranging from elementary school to high school seniors. These co-curricular activities include choir, yearbook, boy scouts, as well as athletics. For athletics, KAUST Schools fields teams in most every sport, including soccer, badminton, and cross country. Each team is coached by KAUST Schools staff, each with experience in the relevant sport.

KAUST’s Harbor Secondary Boys and Girls Cross Country team is coached by two science teachers with running and endurance sports backgrounds. The cross country coaches share a training philosophy that emphasizes distance as a base and intervals for speed. To train, the team runs several routes through the KAUST campus several times a week. The runs nearly always have a section where the runners can feel the breeze coming off the waters of the Red Sea. Some days also include strength training customized for long-distance running, such as running the many sets of stairs in and around the KAUST University campus.

Through co-curricular activities, KAUST Schools actively participates in the Saudi Arabian Intra-Kingdom Activities Conference (SAIKAC) athletic competitions. The Harbor Secondary Boys and Girls Cross-Country team was one of the first athletic teams to travel outside of Jeddah to compete when they traveled to Dhahran to participate in a track meet in February. At the meet, the KAUST students competed against teams from international schools all over Saudi Arabia. One field of high school girls even held over 50 different competitors.

As is common at Inter-Kingdom co-curricular events, KAUST’s traveling coaches and runners were housed with the families of competing athletes at the Saudi Aramco Compound in Dhahran, which hosted the SAIKAC Cross Country meet. By staying with other teams’ families, KAUST Schools students are exposed to new friends from around the world, which also serves to teach the students about good sportsmanship.

In its inaugural outing, KAUST Schools was well represented, placing no lower than midfield in each race. The Grade 10 girls placed second and fourth overall in their grade level while the Grade 10 boy placed third overall in his. It was a very rewarding end for a team that trained hard for several weeks. As one of the coaches said, “Already, after the competition, our students were optimistic about what they can do next year, having improved as much as they did this year.”