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Lightning McQueen

By John Antonik for MSNsportsNET.com
May 22, 2007

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Keri Bland was preparing to run her leg of the distance medley relay at Penn Relays when teammate Halimah Bashir went crashing to the ground in excruciating pain. Bashir had just pulled her hamstring muscle and it looked like Bland’s afternoon in Philadelphia was finished as well.

 
  Kerry Bland won the 3K at the prestigious Penn Relays earlier this year.
WVU Sports Communications photo

But as an afterthought West Virginia assistant coach Sean Cleary had also entered Bland in the 3K with the intention of simply scratching her after she finished her portion of the relay. When Bland didn’t run the DMR, Cleary figured she might as well run the 3K and get a workout in front of 10,000-some spectators.

“I grabbed Keri and told her to go cool down for 10 minutes, get something to eat, and get ready to run the 3K,” Cleary said. “Then she goes out and wins the race. It was the turning point in her career.”

That turning point came on April 26 when Bland became the first West Virginia University female track and field performer to ever win a gold watch at Penn Relays -- one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious track and field events. This soft-spoken, little girl from Fairview, W.Va., had no idea what she had just accomplished.

“That was my first college win ever,” she said modestly. “It was like the championship of America or something like that. It was awesome.”

Mountaineer coach Jeff Huntoon says not be fooled by Bland’s slight build and soft-spoken demeanor: she can turn into a knife fighter when she’s out on the track.

“She’ll get ornery when she needs to,” Huntoon laughed. “That’s a sign of a true champion when you’ve got someone like that – they’ve got that little extra attitude that they can go to.”

“I think I’ve always been like that,” Bland said. “I have a brother and we’re pretty competitive at home. We would always play games outside and my mom is pretty competitive, too.”

Bland’s rapid transformation into one of the country’s top up-and-coming milers is astonishing when you consider her limited running background at North Marion High School. She ran cross country her junior and senior seasons, winning the state title both years by beating out more advanced runners like Morgantown High’s Claire Berryman (now running at Penn State) and WVU signee Kaylyn Christopher from Preston High School.

“She found a way to beat those kids,” Cleary said. “In that respect she was already their equal.”

Once cross country was finished, Bland simply put her running shoes away until the spring when outdoor track season started. Other college-caliber runners were training year-round.

“Every once in a while I would go out and jog,” Bland admitted. “I thought I was working hard in high school but now I see what other girls are doing and it’s like, wow.”

Cleary says Bland got outstanding coaching at North Marion High School, it’s just that West Virginia doesn’t have an indoor track season and that puts most West Virginia girls at a disadvantage with other states. According to Cleary, they evaluate West Virginians a little differently than girls the coaching staff recruits from other states.

“If we were recruiting girls from outside the state and bringing them in on scholarship every one of our West Virginia girls wouldn’t be here based on the times they ran in high school,” Cleary said, noting that his mile cut-off time for out-of-state recruits is 5 minutes. “Every miler on our team didn’t break 5:15 in high school. Now I think we have seven sub-5 girls on the team right now.”

What many West Virginia girls do have is a willingness to work hard and learn, and the very special ones like Kerry Bland and teammate Clara Grandt from nearby Doddridge County have a little mean streak in them when they get out on the track.

Bland, Grandt and Canadian freshman Marie Louise Asselin make up what Cleary already believes is one of West Virginia’s strongest distance trios ever. All three will be competing at this weekend’s NCAA East Regionals in Gainesville, Fla.

“We’ve had some great recruiting classes in the past and it seems like every four or five years we get a really good one,” Cleary admitted. “This group has transitioned into college faster than any group we’ve ever worked with. Part of it is the fact that these freshmen are very competitive with each other in a very healthy way.”

Of the three, Bland perhaps has the highest ceiling because her potential is basically untapped. Remarkably, she has already trimmed 40 seconds off her PR in the mile since high school, and Cleary is convinced that she can go a lot lower. He also believes she can be exceptional at any distance from a mile to 5K.

“Honestly I thought she could be this good – I just didn’t think she would get here this fast,” he said. “She’s blessed with tremendous leg speed and a really natural tendency toward long distances.”

Bland also has a certain naiveté that has proved very helpful on the track. During cross country season she was competing at the Junior USA Cross Country Championships and she started out the race matching California prep phenom Jordan Hasay stride-for-stride for the first 1,000 meters. Running magazines have been profiling Hasay since she was a fourth grader.

“I had no idea,” Bland giggled. “It wasn’t until after the race when someone told me who she was that I realized why we were out so far ahead of everyone else.”

In Huntoon’s mind, a little ignorance is bliss on the track.

“I love that attitude,” he said. “She’s not worried about who she’s running against – just go out and run.”

Yet as Bland’s career advances she is going to have to become a more tactical runner. Because Bland was so much better than the rest of the girls she competed against in high school, she never ran in packs or had to fight to keep herself from getting boxed in.

“Jeff always says I expend too much energy trying to get out of box(es),” Bland said.

Her teammates often joke that Bland looks like a race car the way she pulls out and cuts back in when she passes slower runners.

“When I watch her race I think of the movie Cars,” Huntoon said. “She’s like our own little Lightning McQueen.”

“It’s just the way I run,” she shrugged. “I just try to catch as many of them as I can.”

Pretty soon, everyone might be trying to catch Keri Bland.

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