Friday, September 28, 2001
THE road to building a successful collegiate cross-country program is simple -- get the fastest runners out of high school and teach them to run faster.
Hawaii Pacific's top
By Jerry Campany
cross-country runners have
taken the roads less travelled
jcampany@starbulletin.comBut as Hawaii Pacific cross-country coach Vien Schwinn will tell you, there are different ways of finding the rare athlete who can run fast enough and is mature enough to help her team.
"I look for maturity first," Schwinn said. "Unfortunately you can't measure maturity with a time. All you can do is see a time on a piece of paper and assume that someone will have the maturity to keep working on it. It is unfortunate and embarrassing when someone comes in here with great times but out of shape. They can send you anything and you don't know if it is accurate until they get here in August."
Schwinn moved up to the collegiate ranks in 1999 from Iolani, leaving behind a successful team to take on the challenge of recruiting and rewarding her best runners with scholarships.
Schwinn jumped into the recruiting fray immediately, scouring the state and the mainland for young people fast and friendly enough to join her extended family.
She offered a few invitations to mainland runners based on word of mouth and newspaper clippings, because that is all a cross-country coach in Hawaii -- saddled with a slim budget -- can do.
She tried to persuade the best local runners, to no avail, and brought in a recruit who did not live up to the times she had posted in high school. It is that kind of guesswork that can drive a new coach crazy.
"I can live without the recruiting," Schwinn said. "It is so much work, so much time. I sent out so many packets to local runners, but a lot of them are just not interested. They either want to go to UH or away, and I hope to change that."
Just when Schwinn thought her team might be lacking but ready to start the season, she learned that it never hurts to take a chance.
Schwinn inherited a fractured talent base when she took the job, leaning on all-world runner Nina Christensen from Denmark and a Swedish tennis player turned Olympic hopeful named Lisa Blomme to lead her team.
The pair have combined to win every local NCAA Division II competition over the last two years, with Christensen sweeping in 1999 and Blomme doing so last year. Both runners went to the national meet in their respective years of dominance, but both lost to repeat champion Maria Venalainen of Kennesaw State.
After scrambling to bring Christensen back after a year's respite due to "personal reasons" and learning that Blomme had decided to quit tennis -- where she was rated as high as 18th in the country -- to concentrate on running, Schwinn needed a third runner to keep pace with Brigham Young-Hawaii's talented crew. She found that person right off her No. 1's right shoulder.
Christensen became a team leader by working out in the off-season, and entered February's Great Aloha Run to keep sharp. She is always looking for someone to challenge her and enters nearly all of the competitive events in Hawaii.
She found that challenge in an unlikely source -- a 42-year-old Japanese woman.
Sayuri Kusutani won that Great Aloha Run and answered a few e-mails from Schwinn that, yes, she would like to attend college and run with Christiensen and Blomme every day. For Schwinn, the match was a no-brainer; she had been preaching maturity and discipline from the first day she took the job, and here was the embodiment of that spirit.
Like Blomme, Kusutani had not started running competitively until recently, but fit in with the team's and the school's international flavor.
"We are lucky to have her," Schwinn said. "Like everyone else (on the team), she is here primarily for the education."
