To Payne:
I find that with most freshmen/sophomore athletes, the attitudes really reflect how they feel about the sport. That usually stems from how happy they are or how motivated they are. I think that maybe their poor attitude towards practices and the lack of seriousness could signal that you may not be doing the correct workouts (maybe too hard too early in the season, or too much speed and not enough hills for base)? I'm not sure how you like to run your program, or if you even have access to hills and parks or if you must run roads all the time, but in my years of experience (and I have almost two score years) my high school athletes have run their best after mostly hill training and a fun atmosphere. Let college coaches work them really hard and really fast. High school is really more focused on having fun and there are many ways to make good quality workouts fun. Sometimes my kids like to do loops on mild hilly areas without too much harsh downhill. Antoher workout my kids have really seemed to like is where we do runs over the ridge to the valley behind our school. I'm not trying to change your coaching philosphy, I'm just giving you advice from an experienced varsity level runner.

Running is supposed to be fun. Fine, it's painful sometimes, but most of the time people go to track or cross country practice because they look forward to it and they want to do it. These people that you are concerned about, the ones who are ?slacking off?, probably aren?t excited to run every day. They might think it's just another boring class period which just involves moving their legs. Maybe they are only doing it because their friends are there or their parents want their college applications to look good. I don?t know how you manage your program, but maybe the negative response is because practice is very boring, and tedious.
Sure, you would say there are things that you just have to do; and you are right. Take for example, track work outs. You just can't succeed without them sometimes, but there are work outs that can replace that half of the time. Some fartlek or Indian files are good alternatives.
You might take heed to what your runners want. Don?t listen to every single one of them; just the serious athletes that are passionate about their running and do it not because of how good of a program it is, but how much they like to run.
Also, making yourself sound serious is very important. If you want your athletes to respect you as a coach (as 5kspeedstar mentioned), it is necessary to sound serious and confident. The kids might be laid back because you are laid back. They might treat the sport as a joke if you don?t make it sound serious enough.
Cross country isn't about the times or improvements, placing or rankings. Running is not a class where you are measured by grades. Cross country is a mental and physical sport. Your runners should be valued by their efforts only; not on times. How they place is another story. If you truly convey the meaning of cross country to your laid back kids, they should begin to feel what serious runners feel every time they run, and will be committed and try their hardest, regardless of the place or time. That said, every runner on the team is a valuable runner. A Junior Varsity runner is just as important as you number one Varsity runner. As a slow JV guy in high school, I saw that my coach talked to my JV teammates and myself more than the Varsity team sometimes. One time, the Varsity team and JV were in two different meets. My coach even sacrificied the important Varsity meet to come to our JV meet. His actions made everyone on the team respect him because they knew he cared about every runner. Those laid back kids might feel that you dont really care about them. They feel that it's not worth trying that much harder for you.

Good luck with your team and have a great season.

wut makes u think u kno some of these ppl in person? well u said ur varying routes which is good. also, do u kno the names of everyone on the team/make an effort to learn them? well im pretty sure on every team, u get some people who just slack off or think they are "too cool" the thing that matters is tryin to change that attitude as early as possible. at least they r out there doing it rite? but if they do have a bad "cut runs, ditch practice" type of attitude, i think the team would be a lot better without them. in my high school, when we got kids like that, they just ruin the practice for evryone else wit their "im too cool" type of things. if uve heard about them doing this kind of stuff, u should try asking the rest of the team (individually mayb) if it bothers them, the ppl who work hard.

We have one or 2 people like this. They stop in the middle of the woods. The varsity runners tell people they should be running if they catch people not running. One time we were running and we thought we saw a person not running. So one of the runners yelled "GOTCHA (name which will not be released) you slacker". The person turns around and its our coach (who doesn't run with us due to injuries and whatnot). He was clearing the bushes out of the way because we were running our 5k course and it had been raining there alot. So the runner said "Oops, sorry I thought you were (person who's name will not be released)". Thats my story hoped you liked it.

I think if your runners have times under 5 minutes then they definitely care to some degree about running even if they don't admit it. Scaring them a little by pretending to cut them or confront them while acting pretty mad or something may get them to back down and fall in line but then again it could just cause them to quit.