Seisen International freshman Brittani Shappell has been named Stars and Stripes Pacific's girls cross country Athlete of the Year. (Richard L. Rodgers/Special to Stars and Stripes)
Mike Shappell looked astounded.
Though not his daughter Brittani’s coach, he has witnessed her development in track and field and cross country since she was a fourth-grader with the Whatcom Tesseract Club in Washington.
After a hard workout one afternoon, the father, himself a runner, asked his daughter how she paced herself so she could ensure her lungs keep up.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like, when you go too fast and you can’t breathe hard enough.”
“I’ve never felt that,” she said. “My legs just get tired sometimes.”
Shappell the elder said later that he’d never heard that from an endurance athlete before. “As a coach myself, she scares me,” said the elder Shappell, who coaches tennis at Seisen, where Brittani is a freshman and winner of every cross country event she ran this season.
She won the Asia-Pacific Invitational on Guam, the Kanto Plain finals and the Far East meet as well as every Kanto regular-season meet. Shappell is the only runner ever to go under 13 minutes multiple times at Tama Hills Recreation Center, clocking 12:34.1 in the Kanto finals.
For all that, Shappell has been named Stars and Stripes Pacific girls cross country Athlete of the Year. But it’s more than the times she’s posted; it’s how she does it and what she puts into it.
“It is as much her ability to reach deeper for an effort others are not willing to match and an internally motivated work ethic that drives her success,” her father said.
Shappell arrived at Seisen as a sixth-grader in 2011 as an already-accomplished track athlete who ran and did field events for Whatcom Tesseract. At age 12, Shappell set Pacific records in the 1,500- and 3,000-meter runs, far surpassing high school athletes in each event.
She was “already a very mature and complete runner” upon arriving at Seisen, said coach Matt Granger. Evidence of that, he said, was her use of a stopwatch to set pace times on tempo runs and interval workouts to generate a training log. Granger calls that the product of “high-level” coaching from Whatcom’s Peter Oviat.
Shappell is also self-driven and motivated. “She really shuts everything out when she runs and is very inside herself,” Granger said.
“(Her) attention to detail, high tolerance for the physical discomfort that comes with sport and being blessed with physical talent has been instrumental in the progressive lowering of times and records she has set over the past three years.”
“She makes it look easy,” Seisen athletic director Elizabeth Jury said. “… and she’s not cocky at all.”
At times, Jury said, Shappell will run against boys in workouts to get a feel for having to chase somebody. “She doesn’t know what it’s like to come from behind or kick because she’s always ahead so much.”
The best may be yet to come.
“I’m authentically curious as to what her limits are and I hope to someday witness her fully realized potential,” Mike Shappell said.
