Colorado University Athletics
Brooks: Life In Buffs' Fast Lane A Fine Fit For Ana Holland
April 19, 2016 | Track and Field, B.G. Brooks
BOULDER – Watching a high school track meet several years ago with Pac-12 coaching colleague Drew Morano, Burke Bockman was lost in a daydream. The subject: the farfetched possibility of coaching a certain local sprinter who had captured their attention.
“I had my hands over my eyes,” Bockman, then an assistant at Utah, recalled. “I was saying to myself, 'I can't believe how good this girl is. I wish I could coach her someday.'”
An identical thought was pin-balling through the mind of Morano, at the time an assistant at Colorado. However, both had to be content to fantasize. Attending the same high school meet, a University of Virginia assistant was luckier; he was clearly giddy over that sprinter's commitment to UVA.
That was in 2013, when Ana Holland was a senior at Regis Jesuit and was speeding past her Class 5A sprint (100, 200, 400 meters) competitors like they were mired in April muck.
That was then . . . and then came a seismic shift on the local track scene and a wave of irony that still has Bockman rubbing his eyes instead covering them:
· Holland indeed left for Charlottesville, but spent a summer and part of the fall, found it wasn't the right fit, and returned to Colorado. Morano and the Buffs welcomed her home; after transferring, she redshirted at CU for the 2014 indoor and outdoor seasons;
· Morano, hired in 2009 to coach the Buffs sprinters and hurdlers, tutored Holland for one season (2015) before leaving last September to pursue interests outside of coaching;
· An assistant at Saint Martin's University for one season after spending nine years at Utah, Bockman was hired in September by track coach Mark Wetmore to replace Morano. “And I walk in the door and inherit such a great talent,” said Bockman, nodding toward Holland, who is finishing a warm-up lap in CU's new indoor practice facility.
Jogging might be difficult for her; she's a pedal-to-the-metal type. In not quite two full seasons as a Buff, Holland already has entered CU's record books. As a redshirt freshman in 2015, she set the school mark (23.54) in the 200 meters, then erased it earlier this month by running a 23.45 at the Mt. SAC Relays. Prior to that – on April 9 at the CU Invitational – she toppled the 26-year-old school record in the 100-meter dash, clocking an 11.63.
Her 100-meter time is the 11th-best in the Pac-12 this season while her 200-meter clocking is the 8th-best in the conference. Only five Pac-12 100-meter times are better (10.9 seconds is No. 1) than Holland's and only four 200-meter times surpass hers (22.6 seconds is tops in the league).
IF IT SEEMS HOLLAND IS HITTING her stride, she's merely trying to catch up with her past. Almost amazingly, her standing outdoor PRs – 11.33 in the 100-meters, 23.04 in the 200-meters – were established at Regis Jesuit in 2013.
“I can definitely get better,” she said. “My PRs in high school haven't even been touched yet. So that means I definitely can get better if I haven't even run my high school times.”
Here's why she's chasing those bygone days: After not competing at UVA then sitting out the redshirt season at CU, Holland also battled chronic shin issues and was recovering from a stress fracture. Her training regimen “definitely suffered a lot,” she admitted. “I was on my own at home for the rest of the semester (after transferring).”
Morano sent her three workouts a week, but doing them on her own and not being with her new team was difficult. And she still faced the adjustment of competing at the college level, which she called “a whole different world, a different environment. It definitely took a while and you could see that in my first year of collegiate competition. It affected me a lot. But I'm slowly but surely getting it back.”
Not that what he's seen so far has disappointed, but Bockman is anxious to see Holland in optimum health and at top speed. Holland, he said, has had “huge potential basically her whole life . . . the great thing about her is versatility, her potential not just in one or two events but across the board.”
He points to Holland's participation on CU's 4x100-meter and 4x400-meter relay teams – events that obviously suit her. In 2013 she was a member of the gold medal American squad in the Pan American Games junior championships, and she competed for the 4x100 U.S. relay team that won a silver medal at the 2015 World University Games.
Holland's finish isn't lacking but her start is phenomenal. She's the lead off runner for the Buffs' sprint relay squads, a position Bockman explains like this: “Even though she's our best 100-meter dash runner we have her on the front side of the 4x1, leading off because she's such a big talent there. It kind of gets us off. We can run with anyone in the country through that first leg – we know that. So then it's just up to the rest of the girls to kind of keep the momentum going.”
In addition to setting the school 200-meter record at the recent Mt. SAC Relays, Holland and the Buffs' 4x400-meter relay team ran a 3.37.99 – the 6th-best time in the Pac-12 this season. Bockman called Holland a “huge member” of CU's 4x100 and 4x400 entries at the Mt. SAC competition. “She really had a great weekend, but that's just who she is and who she's always going to be – someone who's very dangerous across the board in the sprints.”
While Holland concedes her start is “way better” than her finish, she says it hasn't been perfected: “I can definitely work on my start but I have a really good nervous system so I can get up to speed really quickly. So that's my strong suit in track in general.
“I wouldn't describe myself as explosive, just because I'm such a small sprinter compared to other girls you see in the short sprint events. I've just always had quickness.”
At 5-2, Holland isn't a prototypical sprinter. Long ago at the starting line in middle school, she used to fret about being the pack's small fry. “I would look around and think, 'She's going to beat me,'” Holland recalled. “But then when you start getting used to the sport you start seeing the most random people being good at the most random events no matter how they're built.
“You don't get to the line and look at anyone because you never how they're going to run unless you personally know them . . . so I go to the starting line now and keep my head down.”
IF BOCKMAN EVER EQUATED SMALL with slow, Holland has cured him of that notion. “She's built a little shorter, a little scrawnier than a lot of big-time sprinters,” he said. “But she just has the 'it' factor. She has great power and great determination. She gets out hard no matter what she's doing; she goes all out. It's hard to slow her down even if I wanted to.”
Holland realized she was fast during an aha moment in youth basketball – the sport that followed unfulfilling stints in T-ball and soccer for Ana (Ah-na) and her older sister Mia, a senior on the CU track team. Going baseline to baseline in a blur, much faster than any other kid on the court, steered Ana from hoops toward track.
“I noticed I was way quicker than most people,” she said. “It was like, 'Oh, I think I'll go out for track and see how that goes.' It was the sport that I was most likely to be the most successful in.”
Continuing her success and taking it up a notch, she said, will happen if “I just come to practice and do what I always I do – give it 100 percent every single time in everything even if I'm super tired or really stressed out. I just need to be in the moment and practice hard every day. I feel like if I can do that I can continue to get better.”
Speed might be Holland's calling card, but that's not all she brings to the Buffs. A work ethic and determination are apparent to CU's academic staffers, the Buffs' strength and conditioning personnel and of course to Bockman. Pushing her to improve comes in teaching details that might have been overlooked because she was so gifted and successful as a young sprinter.
But Bockman hopes honing those details, along with Holland's immense talent and drive, “will get her full race together . . . as a coach, it's kind of amazing and scary at the same time that she'll do exactly what I want her to do. She might have some questions, she might challenge me a little bit – Why are we doing this? – but it's also to make sure she understands what she's doing. That's what makes her great. Then it's on me; she'll do exactly what I want her to do. Hopefully the results are there – and so far they have been.”
Contact: BG.Brooks@Colorado.EDU
