Post-Race Quotes - Coaches

Reported by Parker Morse

In the NCAA, where the twin tides of recruiting and graduation turn over the entire collection of eligible athletes in just over an Olympiad, coaches become landmarks, their names synonymous with the teams they coach. To the athletes, picking a coach and a school is like picking a mate, a decision that will stick with them for years, and the right coach can inspire loyalty that lasts for decades. For the coaches, the cross-country championships is like a massive poker game among friends, played at a rate of one hand per year, which has been going on for decades, and they joke with each other accordingly.

Mark Wetmore
Mark Wetmore has been at the University of Colorado since 1996, but it sometimes seems like he's been there for decades, playing the mountain-weathered, high-milage straight man to Vin Lananna's laid-back California crowd. After developing a reputation for making All-Americans out of ordinary Colorado walk-ons, his success with Adam Goucher won him a series of star recruits; his 2001 Nationals team included five Foot Locker finalists (Jorge Torres, Ed Torres, Dathan Ritzenhein, Steve Slattery and Aaron Blondeau) and the last two champions (Jorge Torres and Ritzenhein).

Notably, Wetmore is now the first coach ever to win all four NCAA titles at a single school: men's and women's individual titles (Adam Goucher in 1998, Kara Grgas-Wheeler in 2000) and men's and women's team titles (women in 2000, men in 2001.)

On Furman: "I know how much work it takes to put on an event one-tenth as important as this. I can't imagine what work it takes to put on this event. On behalf of myself and my team, I'd like to say thanks to all the people here in Greenville who worked so hard to make sure that this race was uneventful and fun and safe for everybody."

On the NCAA as entertainment: "It's a thrill to be here, it's always a thrill to be here. This is the most exciting, dramatic sport in the world for those of us who know it and enjoy it. For those of us who go out in the back and move up through the pack, it's the most petrifying sport in the world."

On his teams' traditional go-out-easy strategy: "We're always petrified about being buried at the mile, every year. It doesn't change. There's some narrowness in this course. That just makes [our strategy] harder to trust. John McDonnell expressed that yesterday [at the pre-race press conference]. He said he thought his team went out too hard to get through the mile closer to the front in '97, and suffered in the last 200 meters. [Arkansas lost to Stanford in '97.] Probably for every team that feels that way, there's a team that feels they got out too slow and got buried."

On the reasoning behind keeping his runners off the early pace: "I sincerely believe that living at elevation is an advantage, but training at elevation is a disadvantage. I believe that when our opponents are doing repeat miles in 4:30, we're doing them in 4:42, 4:45. So we don't really have a choice. The leaders today went out around 4:20 at the mile. If I'd sent Jorge and Dathan with them, that would've been suicidal. We would've been fifth today. We don't really have a choice. My job is to convince them not to be nervous at the mile or the two mile and blow up out of nerves."

On the difference between 8k and 10k races: "It's a twenty-five percent longer race. Imagine running a four-minute mile and as you're coming down the straightaway someone jumps out and says, 'You've gotta do another lap!' It's a big difference, so 8k to 10k is a big adjustment."

On his star freshman: "Dathan has the race experience of a 40-year-old. He doesn't take a lot of management. He's a mellow, calm guy, doesn't like to have a bad workout and doesn't like to have a bad race, but he's much less emotional than a lot of freshmen. He was 4:42, 4:43 at the mile. Do the math, 6.2 times 4:43. I think that's about third or fourth in the race." [Ritzenhein was fourth, and his 29:11 comes in just under the 29:15 pace he ran for the first mile.]

On finally winning the men's team title: "It's absolutely a relief to win the title. I tried to not wear my heart on my sleeve, but I knew that we had won three out of four things that I wanted to win. I was pretty nervous, Vin had a great team, they were getting stronger every meet, and then they were killing us at four miles, and so it did feel like a lot of pressure, and to have it over with is relieving and gratifying."

On the contrasting strategy of his main rivals: "Patrick Shane [BYU's women's coach] said yesterday that you have to know your team's personality, you have to know how you train, you have to run to your own style, and Vin knows how to manage his talent. He's beaten us here more than we've beaten him [at NCAAs], so he'd better dance with the guy that brung him... sorry, some backwoods Palo Alto saying."

Vin Lananna
Vin Lananna has coached the Stanford Cardinal since 1992, and when you've had as much success as Lananna, they stop calling you "coach." His official title is "Director of Track and Field and Cross Country." In 1996 Stanford swept the cross country championships; in 1997 the men repeated. In 2000 the outdoor track team won a national title almost entirely on the strength of their distance runners.

Lananna can also claim the title of the recruiting king. Only two women's Foot Locker champions since 1994 have not attended Stanford, and most of the top recruits not skimmed by Wetmore in Boulder have turned up in Palo Alto. Critics point out that Lananna has everything on his side: California weather, a strong academic program that makes a Stanford scholarship extra-valuable, and in fact every advantage save altitude training. The flip side of Lananna's embarassment of riches is that high school stars frequently vanish in the stew of talent at the Farm. Nearly every year, Stanford has seven runners who can win an NCAA title; the puzzle is, which seven? The 2001 Cardinal won five different meets with five different individual winners.

On the race outcome: "The University of Colorado had a great team, they did a great job, we had a great competition. I thought we could score somewhere in the eighties, maybe in the high eighties."

On his get-out-early race strategy: "I think the guys did a great job, it was a difficult way to run the race because we knew we didn't have the big front firepower, and what we needed to do was make sure we got into position relatively early, which I think we did. I think that we may have gone out a little harder than we would've liked, but that's the only way for Stanford to run. We'll always run that way. So I'll tell you right now, for Indiana State next year, that's our strategy, a year in advance. We will go out hard, and put ourselves in a position to win the race, every time we go out to compete. For a young group of kids, they did a great job, and my hat's off to the University of Colorado. They also are young, an impressive group, and they did an outstanding job."

On the team score, where Stanford nearly caught Colorado with their fourth and fifth runers: "It's interesting that the race would come down to something going on in the back. I had anticipated that it would be something in the front, and that's what we tried to put in the race. Our fifth guy was thirty-seventh [adjusted], which was as good as I thought we could do."

On whether he was worried when sophomore Grant Robison chased the Kenyans through the lead miles: "Hell yeah! It was his first time at the NCAA, and even though we talked about not red-lining it, he was at the red line at two and a half miles. I think that when you do that, you pay the price, but you know what? I'll take it any time. Those kids ran tough, Don Sage was outstanding, Louie Luchini charging in like crazy, and Grant was hurting for a long time in that race, so I give a lot of credit to him and all the guys."

"I don't want to talk about what we didn't do, I'd rather give credit to the University of Colorado, those kids did a great job, and ran tough, and it was a great meet."

Rollie Geiger
Rollie Geiger's North Carolina State University Wolfpack was almost certainly the most underrated team to finish well at Furman. But for Geiger, who coaches both the men's and women's teams, it was a mixed day.

"It difficult because I coach both sides, and our men's program didn't have a good run today. So my brain's kind of with the men's program right now. On the women's side, we ran very well up front. Kristin Price, Megan Coombs, and Katie Sabino ran terrific. I think the key to us today was that we ran well up front, and then Christy Nichols, who ran number four, and has been running a little different strategy in the past, and we had her come off the pace, a little different race for her, then we were good enough at five to close the door and finish second. But the top three were very important."

On what he told the men different from the women: "Last week we had our regional here. The men were talking during the race and ran easy. The women actually struggled last week, a bit. And nine days later, it just flip-flopped. If I could figure it out, I'd write a book. We talked about being tough today. I told the ladies, you're like a linebacker. Look for somebody you've got to hit. They had the mentality today of going to be aggressive. They had to run intelligently, but be aggressive."

Pat Shane
Pat Shane runs his BYU team like a Disney movie about summer camp. Unless you actually catch them at it - say, watching them do speedwork, or seeing Shane shouting advice and motivation during a race - you'd almost think that these women do no work at all, they're simply extraordinarily talented at turning oxygen and inspiration into kinetic energy. Shane takes no credit at all for his team's success, instead managing to imply that all he has to do is keep them in spikes and get them to meets on time. "Somehow," he said at the pre-race press conference, "the little suckers just keep coming up and running fast."

Once you understand this, it seems completely normal for Shane to haul his whole team in for the post-race interview session. This way, if it ever appears that Shane is actually in charge, he can deflect a question to one of his girls, who redirect all credit to Their Heavenly Father without skipping a beat. Maybe they are gifted.

Shane on winning yet another championship: "It was just a great team race. It's really what cross country's all about, when it all falls together, and everyone runs well, and we did, to the girl. To the athlete, they all had great races. The thing that you're reminded of, and you need to remind yourself in a situation like this, is that there were a lot of great teams out there, and a lot of deserving teams, and we feel honored to have won here today. There are some very good teams, very talented young women, and not everyone is able to have a great day every single time out, and we haven't beaten all the teams this year, and today we did, we feel blessed to have done so, and I have to congratulate and take my hat off to my athletes, to the girl they all PRed today. That doesn't happen very often in athletics, but to the girl, every one of them PRed. I'm so proud."

Senior Tara Northcutt on Shane's pre-race instructions: "Rule number one: stay on your feet. But somebody broke that one! We were supposed to start out conservatively and work out way up."

Shane on training dictating strategy: "Altitude always matters. We did get out fairly quick, but Tara [Chaplin] had a lot to do with that. We weren't in over our heads. We didn't talk about the heat. We can't do anything about that, so we talked about the things we could do something about, like how we ran and how we prepared. We didn't even talk about the heat."

Shane on the if-we-win promise which cost him his moustache in 1997: "I learned my lesson, no promises this year."

Northcutt on Shane's promises: "But we've got some blue hair dye in the van..."

Michaela Manova, BYU's first runner, on her strategy: "This was the first race where I ran my race. I didn't hear my times at the first and second miles, so I just ran my race, the way I felt like running it. I was afraid to be too far back at the start. Probably running up more helped my confidence."

Shane on Manova: "We decided we would let her run, and let her teammates find her."

Northcutt on running as a pack: "There's no way you can let yourself slow down with your teammates around you."

Shane on BYU's unique pre-meet ritual: "The day before the meet we went to church for a few hours. Then in the evening we had a team devotional. They go for about an hour and a half or so."

Northcutt on the devotional: "It's very emotional, and helps us get our priorities in place. It reminds us each that I still have parents and teammates and family, and reminds me of what I'm doing, what I have been doing, what I am going to do. You remember that this is just one race."