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Monday, July 31, 2017
Swelling with pride, Notre Dame High School track and field coach Paul Unterreiner watched Claire Morrill run on the streaming video on his computer screen.
Three months ago, competing as a junior for the Bulldogs, Morrill was hitting the upper 2:20s in her signature event, the 800-meter run, in which she holds the school record. On Saturday, on that computer screen, hours away at the USA Track and Field Hershey National Junior Olympic Championships in Lawrence, Kansas, Morrill finished the event in 2 minutes, 17.11 seconds.
It was a personal record for the rising senior, but also now a regular expectation. In three months time, Morrill has cut more than 10 seconds off her personal standard in the event.
"She's mad that she's not running 2:15," Unterreiner said of Morrill's 800 performance.
"That's just the kind of kid she is. She has no idea how impressive that improvement is. She just wants to run faster."
But that wasn't all she was doing. She was also running longer than ever before and over and through obstacles like never before, and excelling at all of it.
At the USATF national meet, Morrill ran in the 17- to 18-year-old division in four different events -- the 800, the 1,500, the steeplechase and the 3,200 relay -- and finished on the podium in all of them.
Her effort in the 800 was a PR and good enough for fifth place. She also finished fifth in the 3,200 relay, with her team crossing the line in 10:28.33 as she ran the first leg of the race; seventh in the 2,000-meter steeplechase in 7:49.34; and seventh in the 1,500 in 4:52.58.
Unterreiner believes it's all the tip of the iceberg for Morrill, who he says is "just coming into her own."
"A lot of it is trusting the process," Morrill said of her growth. "That's what Coach Unterreiner has always taught me.
"You have to be able to break through that wall and trust in your training to make a move when people really start to fall apart. Some of the training I've been doing, I never would have believed I'd be able to do."
Some of the events she's reaching the podium on weren't even in her arsenal a few months ago.
While running for Notre Dame at the district meet in May, Morrill met Jets Track Club coach Vincent Bingham, who encouraged her to join them to compete in the Great Southwest Invite in Albuquerque, New Mexico -- the first competition following the high school season. She made the trip, along with fellow Notre Dame athlete and 2017 Semoball Awards Girls Track and Field Athlete of the Year Riley Burger, and following the meet, she had a long talk on the phone with the coaches about her future with the team. Despite some reservations for Morrill, she decided officially joining forces for the rest of the summer was in her best interest.
"At first, I was a bit reluctant to go up to Festus (where the team trains) as much as I did," Morrill said. "It's hard when I have a full-time job, and I'm [taking college classes] currently. So finding the time was difficult. But I thought I needed it because it's the kind of training I couldn't get on my own. You need people there to motivate you when you can't push yourself through the workout anymore."
Under the guidance of Bingham and fellow Jets coach Rich Borman, Morrill was also pushed into new events. At Notre Dame, she was a rock at middle distances for the Bulldogs, setting school records in both the 800 and the 3,200 relay this year. But at nationals, she stretched herself longer than she had competed before, including taking on the 1,500-meter run (Missouri State High School Athletic Association events are run at 1,600 meters).
"My coach kind of threw me in there, honestly," Morrill said. "I was kind of opposed to it at first ... I had a lot of questions, but at the same time, there was a part I enjoyed of just trying to figure it out."
In fact, Morrill believes her ignorance in the event helped her run more freely, without over-thinking things. The result was a seventh-place finish, and a performance in Thursday morning's preliminary run that she calls her favorite of the week. She credits that prelim effort -- a fifth-place 4:53.75 -- as a confidence boost that launched her into her weekend runs in the 800 and 1,500 finals.
Her foray into the steeplechase had the same sort of introduction -- a reluctant one -- and a similar ending at nationals, with a seventh-place result she remembers fondly.
Steeplechase is not run at the high-school level, and is the odd-ball of the track world, as runners compete in something that looks more appropriate for horses than humans, running not only on the normal track, but also through water and over bush-like obstacles.
Much like her original attitude toward the 1,500, steeplechase was not something Morrill was particularly interested in before she gave it a try.
"I got involved because the first day I showed up, they said I'd be a steepler, and I said, 'No way,'" Morrill said.
"They entered me without me knowing about it."
Instead of disdain, Morrill found she was uniquely suited to the event, and a height advantage over many of the competitors helped her through the water pits and over the hedges.
"I kind of learned to love the event because ... I'm kind of Amazon compared to a lot of these girls," she said.
Her performance in Lawrence suffered a hiccup toward the end -- "You could call me an aquatic diver because I could see the bottom of the water pit," Morrill said -- but otherwise went well in just her fifth time competing in the event.
Morrill's experiences with the Jets competing at national events this summer has also kicked down the door to her future. Prior to this point, Morrill had talked to a couple of college track programs, often sending out emails that went unanswered. But during the last couple of months, she has been in contact with numerous programs, including this past week, and amassed a collection of potential opportunities.
She's had contact not just with nearby programs like Southeast Missouri State and Southern Illinois, but also Missouri State, Missouri-Kansas City, Butler, Purdue, Iowa, Miami, Notre Dame, Northern Illinois, Wichita State and DePaul, the last three to which she's already taken campus visits. Just this past week at nationals, Tennessee Tech added itself to the list.
Morrill said she's hoped for college opportunities since she began track as a freshman, but the growing reality has surprised her.
It's also complicated things. Her plan was to make a college decision by August or September, but an expanding group of options has slowed the process down.
Instead, she'll continue to weigh her choices and, in the meantime, embrace another new challenge -- cross country.
"I have really big goals, and I'm dead-set on being a cross country runner," Morrill said. "... I really have hopes of being an all-state runner this year at 18 minutes or 19 minutes, and then after that, I'll jump into indoor track if that works out -- possibly reach nationals. A lot of cross training -- swimming, biking, lifting. Lifting is really important because during cross country season, I'm not going to do much lifting, so I have to regain all that muscle during indoor season in the winter so I have it ready for spring track season."
Unterreiner has no doubt she will be.
"She is a coach's dream -- good student, hard worker," Unterreiner said. "I have never heard her complain about a workout. She's wise beyond her years, just a joy to coach."
