Ten for 10 in the SEC, No. 7: Schweizer closes career with sixth NCAA title
This fall will mark 10 years since Missouri announced a seismic change: The athletics department would leave the Big 12 conference and join the SEC. Missouri’s new home has brought the department increased revenue, which has helped bankroll improvements like the South Endzone football facility and new softball stadium. But for virtually every sport, the move has brought new challenges, as well — better competition and more pressure to spend to keep pace.
Over the next 10 weeks, we will be counting down Missouri’s top 10 athletics moments from its first decade as a member of the SEC (which is actually nine years of competition because it took a year for the change to take effect). Note that wrestling, which has spent the past nine years as a member of the Mid-American Conference and will rejoin the Big 12 next fall, wasn’t considered for inclusion since it didn’t compete in the SEC.
For our next entry, we look back to June 9, 2018: the final day of the women's NCAA outdoor track and field national championships.
Previous Entries:
No. 10: Thomas' one-hitter clinches regional title
The morning of Karissa Schweizer’s final collegiate race, Missouri track and cross country coach Marc Burns sat her down for a talk. Schweizer had already put together one of the most decorated individual careers in Missouri athletics history, winning five national titles over the previous two seasons, but her chances of adding a school record sixth individual title to her resume in the 5,000 meters at the NCAA outdoor track and field championships seemed to be slipping away. Schweizer was battling an illness — she said she “had a horrible cough and just sounded disgusting” — and had come in third place in the 10,000 meter race a few nights prior after going off as the favorite.
So, Burns gave the talk that no athlete wants to hear: Win or lose her final race, everyone would be proud of Schweizer, he said. And she should be proud of herself, too.
Schweizer didn’t say it aloud, but in that moment, she made up her mind. She wasn’t the type of runner to get the “we’re still proud of you no matter what” speech. She was going to win her final race as a Missouri Tiger.
“I kind of took it as like, no, I’m going to win this,” Schweizer said. “I know you don’t think I can, but I need this.
That mindset represented a stark contrast from Schweizer’s outlook when she arrived at Missouri from Urbandale, Iowa. Schweizer won just a single state championship during her high school career, and she admits when she came to college, winning a national championship was nowhere near her radar. Even after she surprised the Missouri coaches by qualifying for the NCAA cross country national championships as a freshman, Schweizer never envisioned herself crossing the finish line as a national champion. She finished 156th in that race, and afterward she had a very different conversation with Burns, this time with Burns adamant that she could accomplish something few others would have deemed possible at the time.
“I just remember being defeated, thinking there’s so many good runners out here,” Schweizer recalled. “I’ve never been that close to the back of the pack before. And my coach was just like, ‘Someday you’re going to be in the top three at nationals.’ And I was just like, ‘What? Did you just see what just happened?’”
But Schweizer just kept getting faster and faster in training, and it didn’t take her long to prove Burns correct. Not only did Schweizer qualify for the outdoor track and field national championships at the end of her sophomore season, she finished third, a 29-place improvement from the year prior.
Still, it wasn’t until the night before the 2017 cross country national championship meet that winning a title seemed real to Schweizer. Buoyed by her podium finish at the previous spring’s outdoor national championships, she had become a different runner during the summer. Burns recalled taking the team to a meet in Iowa at the beginning of Schweizer’s junior cross country season. Normally, he wouldn’t race the team’s top runners in the meet, but Schweizer’s entire family showed up to watch, and her father, Mike Schweizer, tried to persuade Burns to let his daughter run.
“He was like, ‘Come on man, we’ve got the whole family coming,’” Burns recalled. “And I was like, ‘Mike, trust me. She looks different right now the way she’s training. She is at a whole different level, and we have to get her ready to perform in November at the NCAA meet, because I’m telling you, she’s going to do something incredible.’”
Leading up to those NCAA championships, however, Schweizer had no buzz as a potential winner. Michigan’s Erin Finn had dominated the field at the pre-national meet on the same course a few weeks earlier, beating Schweizer by about 30 seconds. Burns and Schweizer set a goal of finishing in the top five.
The night before the championship, however, the weather took a turn, becoming cold, windy and rainy. Burns once again sat Schweizer down for a pre-race chat. For the first time, she truly believed she would wake up the following morning and win the national title.
“He was just like, you know, this kind of weather, anything can happen,” Schweizer said. “You might be in fifth, but you might find yourself running to win this thing. And I think just having that idea in my head was just like, we’re not settling for fifth. If we’re up there and the chance is there, we’re going to take it.”
Burns’ words proved prescient. The last time he saw Schweizer during the 6,000-meter race, she had about 400 meters to run. A group of two or three leaders had opened up a bit of a gap on her, but Burns knew she was still in striking distance. Suddenly, Kansas’ Sharon Lokedi passed Schweizer in a bid to reach the leaders. Burns said he could almost see Schweizer’s thoughts play across her face: I’ve beaten this girl before, and she’s from Kansas? No way is she passing me.
“You know, like, when a speed boat at the Lake of the Ozarks gets ready to go fast and it rises up and takes off?” Burns said. “That’s what she looked like she was doing to me. I’m like, holy crap, she’s going to win this thing right here. Because she just had this look in her eyes, and she got tall, and you could just see she was getting after it.”
Burns couldn’t see the final few meters of the race from his coaching box, but as he scrambled toward the finish line, he got a phone call from his wife, who had been watching the live stream of the race. He could hardly understand her words through her screaming, but he got the gist. Schweizer had just become Missouri’s first cross country national champion.
The victory represented cause for celebration for Schweizer, too. But it wasn’t long before she decided she was hungry for more — specifically, to win a national title on the track.
“You just start training at just a whole other level, because all that training clicked,” Schweizer said of her first national title. “And I think we just started working out harder. I actually started working out with some of the boys, too, and that really helped just push me to that level. … At the end of the day, for a professional contract or anything, they really want to see your times in the track season. So I think that really motivated me because I knew that from that win I was capable of a lot faster times.”
Schweizer wasted little time crossing that goal off the list. She won another national championship in the indoor 5,000 meters the following March, then repeated the feat at the outdoor championships, as well. The following year, as a senior, she won both the 3,000 and 5,000 meter races at the indoor national championships.
Yet despite all her success, unprecedented for a Missouri runner, in the days leading up to her final college race, Schweizer said she felt pressure to perform. She believed her senior season could have been better. She failed to defend her cross country title, placing 11th at nationals, and she felt like she should have been capable of winning the 10,000-meter race had she been healthy. She wanted to end her college career by defending her 5,000-meter title and making a statement. As if she needed any more motivation, the 5,000 was also the final individual race contested at Oregon’s legendary Hayward Stadium, before the grandstands were demolished and the track renovated.
As a result of her illness, Schweizer and Burns devised a new game plan for the 5,000. In most of her previous wins, she had taken control of the race with about a mile to go, putting enough pressure on the field that no one could surprise her with a late kick. This time, Burns instructed her to stay with the lead group but wait until the final 400 meters to attack.
“We talked through it and we came to the conclusion together that was like, okay, we’re going to stick right on the front as long as you can, no matter what the pace is, and you’re going to save one big push,” Burns explained. “You’re going to jump everybody anywhere within the last 250 meters, and you’re going to go and you’re going to go hard all the way to the line, don’t look back.”
Schweizer wound up waiting even longer to make her move. But in the final half of the final lap of her college running career, she passed the leader, Stanford’s Vanessa Fraser, and pulled away from the field. Furman’s Allie Buchalski offered a late challenge but couldn’t close the gap to Schweizer, who won her sixth national title by just over a second.
After crossing the finish line, Schweizer put her hands on her head, then doubled over. She tried to smile, but the grin gave way to a grimace. She called the race the hardest of her life. Burns chalked up the victory to sheer willpower.
Asked what she felt upon crossing the finish line, Schweizer said “Relief, because it was so hard. But also just, I think, excitement to represent Mizzou, and obviously sad that my time there was done, but I think I was ready for the next step and it just seemed like the perfect ending to my career.”
“It was just huge excitement for her to finish her career that way,” said Burns. “I mean, it was pretty emotional. It was awesome to see.”
While the triumph marked the end of Schweizer’s Missouri career, she’s still running. A few months after winning her final NCAA title, she turned professional and joined the elite, Nike-sponsored Bowerman Track Club with an eye on qualifying for the upcoming Olympic Games. Schweizer will compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials next month, which will be held June 18-27.
In a sense, it’s still hard to believe that a once unheralded, one-time Iowa state high school champion now has a real shot to reach the pinnacle of her sport. But Schweizer’s Missouri career proved to her what she’s capable of. After she transformed from the freshman who needed to be convinced by Burns that she could compete with the top college runners to a senior determined to overcome illness to win a national title, representing her country in Tokyo doesn’t seem like that big a leap.
“I think just constantly believing in myself and overcoming mental barriers just helps me in the future, too,” Schweizer said. “Just looking at where my career is going now — obviously I’m still running — I think looking back on that is just something that I can really build on and realize that obviously there’s more in there.”
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