Total Package
April 26, 2007 09:13 AM | General
April 26, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia University women’s track coach Jeff Huntoon made the difficult choice of taking away Abbie Stechschulte’s little black book. The book was not filled full of important names and numbers, but rather the formulas and calculations needed to determine the scores that make up her best event the heptathlon.
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| Abbie Stechschulte will compete at the prestigious Penn Relays in Philadelphia, Pa., today and tomorrow.
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“She was kind of obsessing with it,” Huntoon chuckled. “She would leaf through it every day and she would try and figure out, OK, if I do a little bit better in this I will get this many points. It’s great to have a goal but sometimes if you obsess with something it can become harder to achieve.
“I’ve got it now.”
Stechschulte has become one of the country’s best heptathletes in part because she has painstakingly analyzed all seven parts to her craft.
“I like to figure out on a good day, a bad day, a medium day, or a great day, all my scores and see what I can get,” the senior said. “Each mark has a point value and that’s what the book is. I just like calculating different things so I could figure out if I do this and this in this event I only need to do this and this in that event to get this score.”
For instance, if she reduces her 800 time by a second or two or throws the javelin another couple of inches it means so many more points to her total score. It’s not exactly Bluto Blutarsky fishing through the garbage looking for answers to the wrong test, but it does offer her a sense of comfort by eliminating some of the unknowns.
Stechschulte has been using her powers of deduction ever since Huntoon convinced her that those Ohio high school championships she was winning in the hurdles would better serve her on a bigger stage in the heptathlon.
Huntoon should know: when he ran in college at the University of Northern Colorado his coach did the exact same thing with him.
“My college coach saw that I was very average in one event and he said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’m going to teach you six others,’” Huntoon recalled. “Before you knew it I had them all down.”
The heptathlon is the ultimate test in track and field comprising these seven events: 100-meter hurdles, high jump, javelin, shot put, 200-meter dash, long jump and 800-meter run. An athlete must have speed, power, endurance, coordination and athletic ability to perform all seven.
The starting point for all heptathletes is the hurdles.
“The two events that would be the hardest for me to teach are hurdles and high jump,” Huntoon said.
What Huntoon saw in Stechschulte was a raw athlete that could do the hurdles and the jumps. Her ceiling was likely not very high in either, but as a heptathlete combining seven different events it was very high. Her running form and technique also needed a lot of work.
“Hurdling is like the gateway to the rest of it and I could hurdle pretty solid and I was a good long jumper,” Stechschulte said. “The throwing events were also easy to pick up because I was a strong girl.”
The real mental obstacle for Stechschulte proved to be the 800. She never trained for mid-distance events in high school.
“I never did anything more than 300-meter hurdles,” she said.
Therefore, Huntoon’s plan was to bring Stechschulte along slowly until she felt comfortable performing all seven. Last year, the decision was made to redshirt the outdoor season.
“The redshirt year was great for giving my body a break and also with all of these events it takes so long to master them,” she said. “I have by far not even come close to mastering them but I finally feel like I’m starting to grasp them and the things I need to do.”
At first, Stechschulte was not sure Huntoon’s patient approach was the right thing to do. She was used to winning races in high school and her results were very average her first couple of years at WVU.
“I came here and he completely changed my running style, my hurdling and just my technique,” she said. “My first couple of years was tough. I was OK but it wasn’t what I was used to.”
Her best heptathlon score was roughly 5,000 heading into this year. The first big boost to her confidence came during the indoor season when she qualified for nationals in the pentathlon (five events) at Big East championships for the second straight year.
“I was going into Big East (indoors) knowing that I wasn’t going to make it to nationals with the score that I had,” she said. “I had to go into Big East very, very focused and serious.”
Stechschulte won the pentathlon with a season-best score of 4,016. That led to her sixth-place finish and All-America honors at indoor nationals with a personal-best score of 4,085. It was 69 points better than her previous best score and 26 points shy of Pat Itanyi’s school record.
That set the stage for Stechschulte’s breakout performance at the 80th annual Texas Relays in Austin on April 5. It was arguably the best field of heptathletes ever to compete in a regular season collegiate race. There were five All-Americans entered including the Pickler twins Diana and Julie from Washington State.
“Going into it I was intimidated because there were five All-Americans in the event,” Stechschulte said. “You don’t get that many in one event other than at nationals.”
What the exceptional field did was bring out the best in the Columbus Grove, Ohio, resident. She topped her personal best by almost 600 points and recorded the sixth-best score in the country with her fourth-place tally of 5,609.
Diana Pickler produced a phenomenal score of 6,205 – nearly 400 points more than this year’s second best performer.
“She just went off in every event,” Stechschulte said. “She had an absolutely fabulous weekend. In the heptathlon you can’t go into a meet and say I want to have a PR (personal record) in every event. That’s unrealistic but she came darn close to getting that in every event.”
Stechschulte wasn’t too shabby herself, automatically qualifying for nationals and more importantly, earning a “B” cut standard for the U.S. Olympic Trials.
“At Texas I brought myself to a completely different level,” Stechschulte admitted. “I wasn’t used to competing that intense.”
Because the heptathlon is so demanding, athletes only perform it a handful of times each season. Stechschulte will next compete at Big East outdoors and then have one final outing at outdoor nationals in Sacramento, Calif., June 6-9.
“I hadn’t done a hep in like two years and I feel like just now after two-three weeks that I’m getting recovered from it,” Stechschulte admitted.
Having already qualified for nationals, Stechschulte can go into the Big East relaxed and focused on enhancing her score.
“I’m so relieved that I don’t have to worry about getting a good score to qualify,” she said. “I’m glad it worked out the way it did and I just can’t wait to see how much better it will be in Big East outdoors with no worries. I’m anxious to see what no pressure will do for my score.”
Just to be extra cautious, Abbie might even be tempted to sneak into Huntoon’s briefcase and retrieve her trusty little black book.
“He stole it from me,” Stechschulte laughed. “My parents got that for me so that me and my mom could try and figure out my scores.
“I want it back!”
