MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Sean Cleary remembers it being one of those dreary, cold Canadian fall mornings – the kind of day that keeps cross country coaches in their rental cars to watch races.

He had taken his WVU freshman runner, Charlotte Wood, across the border to run in the Canadian Junior Cross Country Championships and figured he could also take in the preliminary race featuring some of Canada’s top under-18 performers.

The first two girls who ran past him in the U-18 race were top-level Division I athletes, Cleary thought, and the next girl to come by looked pretty good, too, although she was about six or eight seconds slower than the two girls ahead of her.

When he returned to Morgantown a couple of days later, Cleary went online to look up the results from the race. The first- and second-place finishers were Kendra Lewis and Sadie Sigfstead, a pair of Villanova recruits, and the third-place runner was Ceili McCabe, who happens to be his latest great discovery.

“Because of my experiences with Canadian running, I understood what that secondary race meant, and I believe many of the coaches interested in Ceili (pronounced Kay-Lee) weren’t around to see her run in that race,” Cleary recalled earlier this week.

McCabe, it turns out, was Lewis’ training partner at Little Flower Academy in Vancouver, British Columbia - an outstanding Canadian prep program - and her times were good enough to earn scholarship offers from Baylor, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

But Ceili was still trying to figure out which sport she wanted to play in college. She was also an outstanding prep soccer player with some initial interest from Notre Dame before the Irish cooled on her when she got injured during her junior season of high school.

While doing her soccer research, Ceili also became familiar with West Virginia because of Nikki Izzo-Brown’s great success with Canadian players for the Mountaineers, so when Cleary called McCabe to see if she had any interest in running for WVU, she was receptive.

McCabe also liked the fact that Cleary was Canadian with a long track record of developing Canadian runners in his program.

“It helped that Sean was aware of the Canadian system of running, which was definitely helpful for him knowing my background in a lot of other sports (and) was something he was able to work well with me,” McCabe admitted.

Actually, McCabe had to cut her official visit to WVU short because she wanted to return home to play in a high school basketball tournament. Cleary’s flexibility and willingness to work with her to make that happen made a big impression on her and her mother.

“A lot of coaches would have been like, ‘Well, you are already on your visit here’ and not do anything about it, but Sean immediately understood, and he got me a flight back,” McCabe said. “I think he’s very flexible and very understanding of where people are coming from and is willing to work with them. My mom and I were very impressed that he would think about that and work as hard as he could to make that happen.”

The combination of Cleary’s Canadian heritage, his flexibility and his reputation for developing elite distance runners led McCabe to choose West Virginia University two years ago. Now, McCabe is helping the Mountaineers get back to where they were in the late 2000s when Cleary was producing some of the best cross country teams in the country. 

From 2007 to 2009, West Virginia won a Big East championship in 2007, placed ninth, fourth and sixth respectively at the NCAA championships and had All-American runners Keri Bland, Marie-Louise Asselin and Clara Grandt.

Bland and Grandt were local girls who really thrived under Cleary’s tutelage, while Asselin was a coveted prep performer who also hailed from Canada. West Virginia’s success at the NCAA cross country meet continued in 2011 and 2014 with a pair of eighth-place finishes.

But the program took a big hit in 2016 when Morgantown’s Millie Palladino transferred to Providence following her sophomore season. She went on to become a three-time Big East champion and five-time All-American for the Friars and is now running professionally for New Balance.

Her departure significantly impacted the Mountaineer program, and it also triggered a chain-reaction of top local girls committing to other schools. Something similar happened to Marty Pushkin’s men’s program in the mid-1980s when he had two of his top runners, Steve Taylor and Jean-Pierre Ndayisenga, transfer to Virginia Tech and George Mason after the team bombed at NCAAs.

It took Pushkin about a decade to dig out of that hole once he started recruiting Canadian performers such as Bob Donker and Cleary, who remained at WVU after his running career ended to coach the men’s and women’s distance runners. Since 1997, the four-time Mid-Atlantic Coach of the Year has led 11 women’s cross country teams to the national championships and is approaching 100 total All-Americans in track and cross country.

And once more, Cleary has returned to his old stomping grounds to give the Mountaineer distance program a big boost of adrenaline with Canada’s McCabe.

In a span of six months, Ceili has gone from being just another U.S. collegiate runner to one of the top young, up-and-coming performers in the country - and perhaps even the world by next summer.

Interestingly enough, her ascension began when the world descended into lockdown in 2020 because of COVID-19. She couldn’t return home and couldn’t compete, so all she did was train, train and train some more.

“I was not running super well, and it (the lockdown) really just gave me a lot of time to run,” McCabe explained. Her roommate, Amy Cashin, is an Australian Olympian and the two got into a daily training routine together. “I think having someone to kind of do things day in and day out and stay in a daily routine has been very helpful.

“Since high school, I’ve definitely enjoyed just being in my training on a routine like that, and I think the consistency over that time made me more of a runner than just someone who could grind out a race because I didn’t have a lot of fitness,” she admitted.

McCabe’s rapid transformation has been simply astonishing, according to her coach.

Her confidence level swelled last spring when she placed sixth at outdoor nationals in the steeplechase, and when she began running cross country this past fall, she was 45 seconds faster than she was as a freshman.

This fall, McCabe won the Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational, which featured most of the top collegiate programs, placed first at the Big 12 Championships and also won the Mid-Atlantic Regional race to qualify for this year’s nationals.

Then, she finished third at NCAAs last week becoming the highest finisher ever for WVU, male or female, topping Kate Harrison’s eighth-place finish in 2011 and Carl Hatfield’s 10th-place finish for the men in 1968.

The runner who beat McCabe, BYU’s Whittni Orton, is a sixth-year COVID senior, while second-place Mercy Chelangat from Alabama is a fourth-year junior who was last year’s national champion. When Cleary talked to McCabe after the race, he asked her if she was ecstatic or a little upset for finishing third.

McCabe said she was a little upset with herself because she was so close to winning a national title.

“I always want to put myself in the best position to win,” she explained. “I just wanted to be more competitive to the (finish) line. For me, going into the meet I know the winner and runner-up are probably going to go on and run professionally, so they were more than capable of beating me, but I wanted to have that edge and push them a little harder than I think I did.

“You always want to run them to the line as best as you can, and that’s something I envisioned doing and I didn’t quite get it done, so from that perspective, it’s frustrating to look back on, but I’m also definitely lucky to have the opportunity to hopefully I can put that into action a little better next time,” she said.

Cleary admits McCabe has a world-class training mentality, which separates her from some of the other outstanding runners he’s had here in the past.

“Her recovery, her commitment to the little things such as pull-ups, push-ups and the core work … and just her sheer discipline day after day is amazing,” Cleary beamed. “In her mind is something more unique than the average elite collegiate runner.

“I give speeches to our young runners about pull-ups and push-ups, which is just a basic thing, and she’s the type of person who bought a pull-up bar and takes it with her to meets because she doesn’t want to miss a day doing them,” he added.

“These are kind of small details,” she explains, “but when you are training to be at a level that you want to be, all of those things come into play and it can take your training to a different level.”

Cleary said McCabe’s straight-line speed is what separates her from other runners, along with her impressive athleticism and competitiveness. He said she’s probably comparable to three-time All-American and recent WVU Sports Hall of Fame inductee Keri Bland in terms of running style, and Megan Metcalfe and miler Kate Vermeulen when it comes to closing speed.

Vermeulen was not a very fit runner when she came to WVU and relied mostly on natural ability, while Metcalfe was always the fittest runner in any race in which she competed. Both were national champions. 

Pat Itanyi was a national champion long jumper in 1995 and Mike Mosser was an indoor national champion for the men in the 1,000 yards in 1972.

McCabe is hoping to become the next one.

“Megan willed herself into always being the fittest runner in the race, and I don’t think Ceili is quite to that level right now, which is so exciting because there is more room for growth,” Cleary predicted. 

They have already mapped out McCabe’s schedule for the next six months leading into NCAA outdoors in Eugene, Oregon, and then the World Track & Field Championships July 15-24 in Eugene.

Cleary said they are going to pick and choose which races she runs this winter, beginning in Boston on Dec. 4 to try and get her an indoor championship qualifying time. He said her list includes about 15 races this winter and spring before she goes out to Oregon in June.

“We want to build her up slowly to make sure we meet all of the West Virginia goals at the highest level and then give her a chance to compete in Eugene,” he said.

“Sean has created a program and a timeline for me where I can continue to really build up my base,” McCabe added. “He’s one to say you get fit off the track and once you are fit enough you can be fast on the track. I like that part of his training where I can be working hard and be as fit as I can. That really makes everything else run smoother.”

Ceili McCabe’s performance last year at NCAA outdoor nationals, combined with her third-place finish at last weekend’s NCAA cross country championships, have gotten West Virginia close to where it was a decade ago when the Mountaineers were among the elite distance programs in the country.

“Look at what has happened in the last 12 months for us,” Cleary explains. “We won the Big 12 DMR (distance medley relay), we qualified for cross country nationals a year ago, we’re scoring Directors’ Cup points in outdoor track and we placed 21st at cross country nationals this fall. We did all of this with Ceili.”

What West Virginia needs now is another Ceili McCabe to go with the one it already has for her final two seasons of eligibility at WVU. The Mountaineers have the scholarship money available, and they are willing to go anywhere to find her.

“We’re going to peal the country and the world to find one more front-runner to go with Ceili. If we can find her, then we’re back to doing things nationally again,” Cleary concluded.