On Road to the Championships : Bruin Women Harriers Coach Recalls Rough Spots

What really bothers Bob Messina are things that he cannot control.

And, in four years as the UCLA women’s cross-country coach, Messina has been troubled by more then his share of just such problems.

During his first season in 1984, the previous year’s leading UCLA finisher in the NCAA District 8 meet, Anabelle Villanueva, was playing with a soccer ball with friends near her dormitory. With a full swing of her leg, her shoe made solid impact with the ball but also caught the top of a sprinkler head hidden in tall grass. It broke a toe joint and ended her year.

A few days before 1985’s first meet, Denise Ball, who qualified for last summer’s Olympic Trials in the 1,500-meter run, was doing sit-ups when she heard something pop in her left knee. It turned out to be cartilage damage and required arthroscopic surgery.

And in 1986 Tammy Snyders, now a top senior on the team, slipped on a piece of ice in a restaurant. She turned her left ankle so severely that she was sidelined with ligament damage to her foot, which continues to bother her.

“You just want to shake your head,” said Messina, reflecting on past misfortunes. “And besides, who ever wrecked a knee doing a sit-up?”

But for the past two years, the team has been relatively calamity-free and is ranked eighth in the nation. It will compete at the NCAA District 8 Championships at Woodward Park in Fresno on Saturday, a meet that will determine teams participating in the nationals nine days later in Ames, Iowa.

The top two teams in the district meet will advance, with the possibility of a third in an at-large berth. Favored in Fresno is Oregon, the defending national champions and ranked second to North Carolina State, with UCLA picked as runner-up. They finished in that order at the Pacific 10 Conference meet at Stanford, which was won by Oregon junior Liz Wilson.

The Bruins are led by junior Laurie Chapman of San Jose and Melissa Sutton, a sophomore from Newbury Park. Freshmen Kristie Bache of San Diego and Jennifer Ashe of San Jose and seniors Pam Thompson of Saugus, Debbie Williams of Norco and Kim Stewart, who attended Taft High in Woodland Hills, make up the rest of the team. Possible alternates are senior Nancy Brown, junior Laura Chapel of San Diego, a two-time NCAA meet qualifier in track at 1,500 meters, and Tammy Snyders of Huntington Beach.

The UCLA program may well be on the verge of meeting the high expectations, those of Messina and others, of finally becoming a consistent top-five team and, eventually, an annual challenger for the national title. But before that there’s that problem with the Pacific 10 Conference championship, won by Oregon every year since the meet was begun in 1986, with UCLA finishing second each time. And then there’s the burden of having to answer any questions about the strength of West Coast cross-country.

Last year’s team finished third in the District 8 meet behind Oregon and UC Irvine. UCLA, Clemson and Brigham Young were considered for the last at-large berth for the national meet. Because their records were so close, it came down to a vote among the 12 members of the NCAA Track and Field Committee. Clemson won.

Tony Sandoval, coach of the women’s team at California and a committee member for seven years, believes there is resentment among the groups’s East Coast majority, what with over half of the qualifiers for the NCAA track meet coming from schools in the West, and they feel shortchanged because their own region lacks the favorable West Coast climate. He had voted for UCLA in what turned out to be a very close vote.

“I thought they (UCLA) should have gone. There is no question that there is a bias against the West Coast,” Sandoval said. “And they don’t feel we are very strong (in) cross-country.”

UCLA had only one senior in the 1987 district meet, and Messina feels he will be returning this year with a stronger group.

“This one is a step up. It’s more cohesive and is my deepest team yet,” Messina said.

Depth seemed to be a characteristic, in the extreme, for the teams he coached for nine years until 1982 at University High in Irvine. In a school with an enrollment then of 1,200 students, and with assistance from coaches Don Christensen and Janice Rolfing, his four boys and two girls teams in one season consisted of 186 runners. They needed two large buses to get to meets.

The boys and girls programs, winners of four Southern Section team championships, were as respected as any in the country, according to Doug Speck, a senior editor for Track & Field News and an authority on high school cross-country. He believes there’s no doubt that the 1981 University High girls team, which set the course record of 92:25 at Mt. San Antonio College, was the best ever in the United States.

While the success of Messina’s teams was personally fulfilling, the strain of teaching English classes and the amount of time spent coaching eventually began to make him weary.

“I hated the paper work, grading papers, and I was never caught up,” the 39-year-old Messina said. “Toward the end of the track seasons in May, I was getting depressed falling so far behind in my work. On a Saturday, I’d get to a track meet at 8 and wouldn’t leave until after 5. Then on Sundays, I’d spend all day grading papers. And I had a family I didn’t know. They’d look up and say, ‘Who’s this guy?’ ”

With the demands on his time, especially during summers taken up with an informal training program with 70 to 80 of his runners, his salary as a secondary teacher suffered for his not taking postgraduate units or school district in-service classes. It was about the time that his third child was born that Messina felt that a change had to be made.

It was after he started to squeeze in time for classes toward a masters in English at Cal State Fullerton that it was suggested he apply for the school’s opening as head coach for the men’s and women’s track and cross-country program. Though at that point he was contemplating possibly leaving coaching and concentrating solely on teaching at a new level, he handed in his resume on the last day and did get the position.

During the two years at Fullerton, Messina learned to enjoy working with older athletes and began to grow more comfortable with the thought that coaching might be something he’d like to continue doing. And he believes it prepared him for the UCLA job.

Also having the most outstanding athlete from University High, Polly Plumer, already at UCLA, did nothing to hurt his chances. He had developed her from a ninth-grade cheerleader into the national high school record holder in the mile (4:35.24), and when she joined UCLA in 1982 she was a running testimonial to Messina’s coaching. And two years later he arrived in Westwood to head the women’s distance program in cross-country and assistant to Bob Kersee in track.

Messina did not find the transition easy.

While he has had success in developing his walk-on or non-scholarship runners, there is a problem with recruiting the best talent. He has yet to bring in any standouts from out of state and it has not been easy even identifying the appropriate high schoolers to pursue.

“It’s a real crap shoot,” said Messina. “Recruiting in any sport is tough, but for women’s distance running even more so.”

He has observed that some girls who have excelled in high school will experience late physical development in college, with many having trouble adapting and becoming runners accustomed to a different body type.

One of his former athletes, who had been among the nation’s elite in high school, entered UCLA as a 5-foot tall freshman and ran her personal best in track. Then, within 4 years, she grew 6 inches and saw her performance and confidence plummet.

“In high school, you think you’re the best of the best. And when you’re in college, it’s really difficult finishing fifty-fourth in a race. You really become self-critical,” she said, now a graduate student with plans to start road racing next year.

Scott Chisam, Messina’s predecessor at UCLA, thinks that a great high school runner will often have single-minded devotion that can easily change in college.

“A lot of girls seem very fired up in high school and they never have it again,” said Chisam, now head of the men’s team at Stanford. “And that is very difficult to predict.”

Even with outstanding runners he inherited from Chisam, Messina’s first year was frustrating with injuries in the fall, in which the team finished fourth in the district, and later in the spring track season. The next year proved to be an improvement with the cross-country team finishing third in the district and sixth in the nationals. With Plumer leading as the fourth finisher, the team ran with a collective sense of purpose.

“Nobody expected us to do well, being from California and running in 32-degree weather in Wisconsin,” remembers Denise Ball, then a junior and now an assistant track coach at Newbury Park High. “That was so nice.”

Messina would return the next year with what he believes was a much stronger team that won the district meet. But it placed 11th in the nationals and was the greatest setback in his career.

“We really fell apart big time,” he said. “I was walking around in a daze for two months. I still don’t know what happened.

“The toughest thing, and most coaches will agree, is dealilng with the athletes’ disappointments. It’s dealing with the down times, the injuries. And coaching this is not technical. It’s not a science. It’s a head game. You try to make them feel good about themselves. And I’m driven to know I can learn more. That I can be better.”

And sometime last spring, Messina says he decided he was going to be firmer with his runners. It was after one of his most determined and spirited athletes, Melissa Sutton, convinced him that she was ready to run more in practice sessions by appealing to his reluctance to put a damper on enthusiasm.

When Sutton suffered a foot stress fracture, he decided that mutual decisions on her workouts were out. He now limits her to 40 minutes of training a day and doesn’t allow her to join the team for morning workouts, with no room for argument. And she is healthy and running well.

“I’m much more hard-nosed now,” Messina said. “They’re not going to sweet-talk me anymore.”