Cross Country Notebook: Searching for a Challenge
September 22, 2011 | Women's Cross Country
Sept. 22, 2011
By Ira Green for UofLsports.com
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - When coming to a fork in life, many people choose to take the familiar path. It's the easy decision and the risks are minimal. For Louisville cross country and track and field assistant coach Taryn Sheehan, her life has always been about taking the road less traveled.
Before reaching the coaching plateau, Sheehan competed for three years at St. Francis (Pa.), earning all-Northeast Conference honors three times in track (2004, 2006-07) and twice in cross country (2004, 2006). In 2006, she set the Northeast Conference's outdoor record in the 10,000m, with a time of 36:18.38. Also displaying her value of academics, she was named to the NEC Honor Roll each year from 2005-07.
Consciously or not, she made the challenging jump to compete in the BIG EAST from 2007-08 at Louisville on the cross country and track and field teams. Sheehan was a scoring runner at each cross country meet, and she set the school's indoor record in the 3,000m, racing to a time of 9:39.04. She also holds the fifth-fastest indoor time in the 5,000m, with two top-five outdoor times in the 10,000m.
Upon graduation from Louisville, Sheehan joined the Cardinal staff as a volunteer assistant for a year, a time in which she forged a strong bond with head coach Ron Mann. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the year, she accepted the first assistant coaching position of her career and left for Western Michigan. While gaining full-time employment was appealing, the challenge that came with the position might have overshadowed the opportunity.
"Coming from Louisville and taking the Western Michigan job was a big jump," Sheehan admits. "I wasn't expecting the range of abilities on the team. It was definitely a shock, and the track program there has been historically good. The men's cross country team won the NCAA title back to back (1964-65), so there's really a rich tradition in the Mid-American Conference and at Western Michigan of good distance running that had been lacking as of late.
"The distance side was really just lacking direction and discipline, and I think that was one of the biggest things in going there was putting in a foundation to the program and getting the girls to believe in what they could do and beyond that. The year or two before I got there, they had only scored five points on the track from 800m-10,000m."
Sheehan knew that, in order to turn the program around, she was going to have to make many sacrifices - mainly her time - to recruit, put together practice plans and make time for meeting athletes among other items.
"Hours on me, I don't even know if I should tell you," Sheehan remarks. "I'm very lucky that I have the most amazing husband (Ryan, a two-time outdoor All-American) who is not only supportive, but helps keep me sane in a certain sense and is a great sounding board. Really, it's like a 2-for-1 deal because he was around and helped me. He was someone who understood there were some late, late nights and some long weekends - lots of hours."
With a plan in place, Sheehan quickly went to work by first adjusting the team's state of mind and hoping to restore the program's culture to one of a winning fashion. Regardless of the preparation, she knew it was ultimately up to the athletes to execute the plan.
"We probably made the turn indoors my first year there," Sheehan, smiling, recalls. "We went to the Tyson Invitational in Arkansas, and we had a distance medley relay with three freshmen on it. I was really nervous and hoping we would stay in the race with three freshmen on it. We were going against Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma State and Illinois, so I was really nervous and just hoping we could stay in the race. At one point, during the race, I was like, `Oh my gosh, we can win it.' We ended up winning it, and I think the girls were surprised, too. Part of them was just hoping to stay in the race. It was a big meet.
"To be at a huge scale meet like that and win, from that point on, they really just started buying into it. Going to the conference championships, we really spent all season telling them what to expect. I think it was more of the mental preparation than the physical part. They performed exactly the way we laid out the game plan. They just bought into that success, and when the rest of the team saw it too, it caught wind."
Away from that one meet, the program made another historic push the following season in 2010. On the cross country course, Sheehan directed the women to a sixth-place finish, its highest since 2006, at the 2010 MAC Championships, and its best mark (15th) at the NCAA Great Lakes Regional Championship since 2004. On the track in 2011, her distance runners scored the most points in school history at the league championships under the current conference configuration.
While those accomplishments don't sum up her entire tenure at Western Michigan, the tremendous feats rightfully caught the eye of coach Mann.
"The ability to come here and return to a place that I was familiar with and really had a great experience being here as a student-athlete - it was definitely good," Sheehan says. "Still being young in my coaching career and having someone like coach Mann and even coach (assistant coach Joe) Walker to learn from - it was just logically a good move, and to get the women's team to the same level with the men - I like a challenge."
Taking over a cross country program that hasn't reached the NCAA Championships, won its last conference title in 1996 and boasts one distance All-American (track), Sheehan knows her work is cut out for her.
 | "I feel that Joe and I, together, with coach Mann's guidance, we can definitely take it beyond what we can even think of." |
"It's easy when you have good kids to keep them running fast," Sheehan states. "For me, the most exciting part is when they just get it, when that light bulb goes off and they believe in themselves. Once you have an athlete who's running well, believes in themselves and is confident, the sky is the limit. It's almost dangerous in how good they can get. That's not always easy to do.
"Sometimes it's not about just getting there, it's maintaining that. It can be short-lived, and nothing lasts forever. It's working through those struggles for those triumphs. Every athlete is going to have things that happen in their life, but it's getting them to learn to deal with that and having them perform at the top of their level academically and athletically. It's just fun to see that when they reach that success."
While it might be easy to second guess Sheehan's decisions, don't expect her to take the easy way out. She says she's ready for grind, and if there's one thing she excels at, it's a challenge.
"I feel that Joe and I, together, with coach Mann's guidance, we can definitely take it beyond what we can even think of."
