y Curtis Anderson

The Register-Guard

Published: (Tuesday, May 24, 2011 05:04AM) Today

CORVALLIS — Oregon State’s women’s distance program hasn’t quite turned the corner, but the finish line is in sight.

The Beavers will have three entrants in the 5,000 meters on the final day of competition at the NCAA West preliminary round, which runs Thursday through Saturday at Hayward Field.

If either junior Laura Carlyle or seniors Hayley Oveson and Jennifer Macias can place in the top 12, they will be OSU’s first qualifiers for the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships since the program was reinstated in 2004.

“That’s our goal. Absolutely,” said Carlyle, the Pac-10 runner-up in the 1,500, who is only in her third season of competitive running.

Oveson placed fifth in the 5,000 at the conference meet, and Macias was added to the field on Monday when a couple of runners ranked ahead of her scratched out of the race.

Sullivan, of course, understands what it would mean for the OSU women to have a presence at the NCAA championships. He cited the attention that Beaver football star Jordan Bishop created last year when he made it in the high jump.

But Sullivan is also keenly aware that it has taken the OSU women far too long to get to this point.

“We’ve been dying for somebody to break the door down,” he said. “But we should have been scoring (at Pac-10s) a long time ago. I look at it like, ‘Why is it taking us so long?’ We should have been doing that already.”

A series of injuries stalled OSU’s progress, although after starting out with enough funds for a single scholarship in 2004, the program’s financial support has more than doubled in the past two seasons, allowing Sullivan to cross the state border when recruiting.

The program also received the green light from the OSU administration to hire a full-time athletic trainer last spring to help with the prevention of injuries.

And now, anticipation grows among Beaver fans for the June 14 ground-breaking ceremony that will mark the launch of OSU’s new track and field facility — phase one includes a track, turf infield, runways, aprons and lights.

“The hump is being crested,” said Oveson, who is back competing after being sidelined the past two years, most recently with a stress fracture in her upper hip.

“I’m really excited about our future,” Sullivan added. “No matter what happens this week, we’re going to keep moving forward.”

Diamond in the rough

Carlyle has been the catalyst to the recent emergence of the OSU women’s track program, but it took a pair of sharp eyes to spot her potential.

In the late fall of 2007, she was walking through the campus of Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Wash., when Joel Pearson saw her, intrigued because she was toting a triathlete’s bag.

As the head coach of the school’s fledgling cross country team, Pearson asked a couple of his athletes to find out who she was.

They returned with the news that her younger brother, Scott, was a freshman on the varsity cross country team at Sehome High School, who has since gone on to win two state titles.

As for Carlyle, she was an age-group swimmer who dabbled in mini-triathlons growing up in Kelowna, B.C. But she dropped swimming after her sophomore year at Mount Boucheire Secondary School.

“I was always the one who slept over at my friend’s house, and got up at 4 a.m. to sneak away to swim practice,” Carlyle said. “I wanted to be with my friends, so I got out of swimming.”

Carlyle’s parents moved to Bellingham midway through her senior year. She stayed in Kelowna to graduate with her class, and then joined her parents in the summer. It was too late to enroll at a four-year school, so she headed to Whatcom.

Pearson was the happy beneficiary.

“He sent me an e-mail,” Carlyle said. “They were trying to get a cross country program started and they needed more people. He knew my brother ran for Sehome ... I knew what cross country was, but I had never raced it.”

One year later, in her first season of cross country, Carlyle won the individual title at the Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges championships in Battle Ground, Wash., by a large margin.

More importantly, she was hooked on running.

“It came naturally,” she said. “It wasn’t so much the winning of the races. It was the sport I was falling in love with. ... I didn’t know what it meant to win those races.”

At Pearson’s invitation, Sullivan was at the NWAACC meet, and he saw a young runner with untapped potential.

Because the nature of the course’s layout, he was only able to watch Carlyle run a few minutes of the 5,000 meter race, but he was impressed enough to bring her to Corvallis for a visit and offer her a scholarship.

For Carlyle, it was an easy decision. She wanted to be in the Pac-10, and Sullivan seemed to be a great match.

“(Kelly) is really observant,” Carlyle said. “He has the biggest heart, and he cares so much about the sport beyond the results and what you’re going to do for him at OSU in those years. It’s so rare to find that at this level.”

Setting OSU records

After a solid first season, Carlyle has blossomed into OSU’s best runner this year.

It wasn’t an easy transition.

After training with the men at Whatcom, she was initially “overwhelmed” when she first arrived at OSU, and attended a cookie-decorating party for incoming recruits with 35 teammates.

“It was all girls, and there were so many of them,” Carlyle recalled with a laugh. “I was in shock. I was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness. This is what we’re going to do every weekend?’ I don’t fit in.”

But soon she learned they all spoke a common language: running.

“That’s the single most important thing I’ve got going on right now,” Carlyle said. “Every day, I learn so much. Every race is new and exciting. ... When we do workouts, I don’t know what the times mean. I just smile and do them.”

Although Carlyle exceeded expectations by placing second to UO sophomore Jordan Hasay in the Pac-10 1,500, Sullivan chose to stick with the game plan and enter her, along with her two teammates, in the 5,000 this week.

Carlyle owns the school record in both events.

She ran 16 minutes, 19 seconds in her only 5,000 of the season at the Stanford Invitational in late March, and she ran 4:18.73 in the 1,500 at the Payton Jordan Cardinal Invitational on May 1.

At this week’s NCAA West preliminary round, she would have been seeded seventh in the 1,500. Instead, she comes into the 5,000 ranked 24th; La Grande’s Oveson is 34th (16:34.00) and Hermiston’s Macias has a PR of 16:47.91.

“We’ve been training for the 5,000 all year,” said Sullivan, who added that Carlyle’s naïveté in racing could work to her advantage.

“There are a lot of variables in the 1,500 that you don’t have with the 5,000. It’s one race instead of rounds. ... Right now, she still doesn’t know who people are. I can show her times and names and it doesn’t mean anything to her. She has no clue who she’s lining up against.”

Naturally, both of Carlyle’s coaches are enthusiastic about her future in the sport.

“To me, she ranks as the most talented, most gifted and hardest-working athlete I’ve ever had at Whatcom,” Pearson said. “I would be surprised if she didn’t end up at the Olympics for Canada, and I have lots of workouts and training sessions to back that up.”

“Laura is a beautiful runner,” Sullivan said. “She’s incredibly efficient, very smooth and light on her feet. ... She already has a set of goals set up, and to this point, she has reached every single one of them. Nobody has a crystal ball, but I think she has the potential to someday run at a very high level.”

A trip to the NCAA championships would be a huge step in that direction, for Carlyle and the entire OSU track program.