The sun is shining at Angell Field and Vin Lananna is having a good day. He’s watching his pack of young distance runners have at each other in a 2,000-meter intrasquad time trial. Skinny and strong, with long, sinewy legs and intense stares, they look as if they could run forever. Lananna smiles as Jonathon Riley, the defending NCAA 5,000-meter champion, bursts away from the pack in the last hundred.
There’s a lot to smile about. Lananna has built a veritable dynasty since he arrived to coach track and cross country in 1992. During Lananna’s tenure, Stanford has won four national championships (three in cross country, one in track). For the past eight years, both the men’s and the women’s cross country teams have placed in the top five nationally. And expectations are high for this year’s track teams, which are led by distance runners Riley, ’01, Donald Sage, ’04, and Lauren Fleshman, ’03, as well as field specialists Milton Little, ’03 (long jump), Michael Ponikvar, ’02 (high jump), and Jillian Camarena, ’04 (shot put).
Lananna’s specialty, distance running, spans both sports. During the fall cross country season, athletes race over hill and dale for five to 10 kilometers. During spring and summer, the same athletes compete in the 10,000, the 5,000 and the middle-distance events: 3,000-meter steeplechase, 1,500 and 800. “It’s sort of crazy,” says Seth Hejny, ’03. “You have to be really focused and willing to dedicate your entire life to it.”
And Lananna has. A former cross country team captain at C.W. Post College in Long Island, N.Y., he coached at Post and Dartmouth before joining the Cardinal. “He came here 10 years ago and built this program,” says Frank Gagliano, a former head coach at Georgetown who now coaches the Nike Farm Team, a postcollegiate group of about 50 runners who train on and around the Stanford campus.
Lananna began by trying to convince top-tier high school runners that the unranked cross country team would soon become a national powerhouse. “A lot of hard work went into recruiting that first class,” he says. “Each one of those men and women had to have a really vivid imagination. But if you look at all the other sports, that’s the thing that told us we could do it. I mean, if you see that swimming and tennis and soccer and everyone else is doing well, you have to figure that it can be done.” Four years later, that recruiting class brought Stanford its first national championship in cross country.
Lananna’s athletes attribute his recruiting success to his low-pressure approach. “Lananna never seemed like he was trying to sell Stanford,” Riley says. “He just posed questions and let me answer them myself.” Riley was among a slew of standout American high school milers who attracted considerable media attention while trying to break the four-minute mark before entering college—a group that also included classmates Michael Stember and Gabe Jennings.
In 2000, those athletes contributed to the Cardinal’s first men’s track championship since 1934—and Jennings, Stember and Brad Hauser, ’99, went on to compete for the United States at the Sydney Olympics. Since distance runners generally don’t mature until their mid-20s, having three collegians on the U.S. team—from the same school, no less—was quite a coup.
But it’s all part of Lananna’s master plan: to make American distance runners more competitive in a sport long dominated by European and African athletes. He’s increasing the Stanford team’s exposure to the world’s best athletes by hosting elite competitions each spring, including the Cardinal Invitational, the U.S. Open and the U.S. championships. “The biggest driver for Coach Lananna is for athletes to be thinking beyond NCAAs,” says assistant coach Mike Reilly, ’92, who organizes the meets. “He wants to raise the level of American distance running. And by gosh, if no one else is going to do it, we’ll just go do it ourselves.”
—Mikel Jollett, ’96
