If you want to get to know new Idaho State cross country coach Sean-Patrick Oswald, it’s best to start by looking at his own athletic career.
Coach SPO, as his ISU athletes call him, was largely a basketball and football athlete in high school. It wasn’t until he got to Duke that legendary Blue Devils track coach Norm Ogilvie believed in him enough to give him a shot on the Duke track team — and opened his mind to the concept of competing as a track athlete.
“Anything that I have done now and been able to continue in this sport for this long is, by and large, owed to him,” said Oswald. “Giving me a chance when a lot of other people said, ‘You aren’t a D-I athlete.’ Which was probably objectively true at that time.”
If Oswald believed it was true, he certainly didn’t let it dissuade him from putting in the work to become a Division I athlete. Specializing in the 800-meter run, he left the Duke program owning four school records, including being a part of the record-setting indoor and outdoor 4x800-meter relay teams, the indoor distance medley relay and the individual indoor 800-meter run.
After graduating from Duke with bachelor’s degrees in biology and religion in 2011, Oswald entertained ideas of continuing to run the 800 on a semi-professional basis. But that is when we get another peek at his character.
The youngest of four children in his very competitive family, his two older brothers were running marathons and competing in Ironman competitions while little brother Sean was just running a half-mile as his principal competition. As his post-graduate enthusiasm for training for the 800 waned, the opportunity to challenge his brothers at longer distances became irresistible.
“I just realized that my heart wasn’t really in training for the 800,” Oswald said. “So that meant the only logical thing was to go from 800 to 52 by 800, or the 26 miles of the marathon in order to take down my family. I should say, to take down my brothers.”
He ran his first marathon, the Chicago Marathon, in 2012, and qualified for the Boston Marathon. His first experience in the revered Boston event was in 2013 — the same year that the Tsarnaev brothers planted two homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the race, killing three people and injuring 260 more.
Oswald ran the race with one of his brothers and a close friend from college, and his parents were near the finish line when they crossed. Fortunately, no one from his immediate circle was injured, but the terrorist act had a deep impact on Oswald.
“I walked away from that finish line, which I thought was going to be my only Boston (marathon), and potentially my last marathon and after things settled down and I had time to reflect, I kind of made it my personal commitment that no one was going to take running away from me,” said Oswald. “And no one was going to make me scared to run. So, I decided I was going to keep going back to the Boston Marathon, every year if possible, and just make it my thing.”
He’s made eight Boston Marathons so far, and he’d love to go back for next spring’s — if his calendar is open. But now he has a new priority — two, really. The first is coaching ISU’s cross country team, whose season officially begins Sept. 5 in a meet at Utah State in Logan. The second is mentoring the ISU distance runners on the Bengal track and field squad through their indoor and outdoor seasons.
Oswald succeeds Zach Kughn, who made significant strides with the cross country team in his two seasons as mentor before he left the program in June. Both the Bengal men and women finished fourth in the Big Sky Cross Country Championships last fall. It was the highest finish for the men since 2007. The women, meanwhile, had back-to-back fourth-place finishes under Kughn after finishing ninth the year before.
Having just arrived in Pocatello a couple of weeks ago, Oswald doesn’t even know who his top five runners will be for either the men or the women, much less where they’re likely to finish in the conference race. In fact, he’s not exactly sure what runners will be eligible to race for him this fall, given all of the upheaval with the NCAA eligibility rules.
“In many situations, we have to be honest in that we don’t have all the answers right now (about who will be eligible),” said Oswald. “What is true is that we’ve got some great people here — returners as well as non-returners. We’re really excited to develop them and they can make their mark.”
On the men’s side, Oswald is hopeful that Caldwell native Seth Babbel, who led the Bengals with a 12th-place finish in last year’s conference championships, will be granted an extra year of eligibility. He’s been working out with the team and providing great leadership, according to Oswald.
He’s also hopeful Chubbuck native Sunny Gunn, who placed 29th in last year’s conference championships, will get an extra season. And he’s excited about what he’s seen so far from junior college transfers Tayvien Biancuzzo and Jackson Koontz, both natives of Tucson, Arizona.
For the women, Lake Stevens, Washington, native Ashley Reeck, who finished 16th in the Big Sky championships last season, is hoping to get an extra year of eligibility. She would join Idaho Falls natives Allie Lemons and Alivia Johnson, Rockland’s Kamber Scott and Addie Wilson, and Elise Wright of Providence, Utah, in the group that has so far impressed Oswald.
“I’m not the guy who is going to say we have to run this time, or we have to finish at this place,” said Oswald. “The goal I have is that we want to keep developing the great roster that we have. If we’re fortunate to bring back some people that maybe we didn’t anticipate having, I think that is going to put us ahead of where we thought we might be at this point. But by and large, we’ve got great talent, new talent, returning talent, that I think is going to put us right in the thick of things where we’ve been in the past.”
The Bengals have 11 women and 13 men on the roster as of now, and Oswald is hoping to take as many of them as he can to the opener at Utah State. ISU then has a meet in Missoula Sept. 18, followed by their only home meet of the season — the Bengal Invitational on Oct. 2, with the women’s race going off at 11 a.m. and the men’s at noon.
Then they participate in the Princeton Invitational in New Jersey on Oct. 16, followed by the Big Sky Championships in Flagstaff, Arizona, Oct. 30. NAU is the perennial favorite to win both the men’s and the women’s titles, and that will certainly be the case with the Lumberjacks hosting the conference meet this year at their 7,000-foot elevation course. Oswald isn’t letting the NAU dynasty distract him from his work in Pocatello.
“There are other great schools in the Big Sky as well,” said Oswald, 38. “The Big Sky is a distance running conference … I think we have a lot that we’re going up against in terms of some very worthy competitors and I also think we deserve to be right there, and they should be looking at us too. I’m hoping the team believes and buys into that as well.”
Oswald, who comes to ISU after serving much of the past decade as an assistant with the Duke program, has a very simple coaching philosophy.
“I’ve been fortunate to do this sport for a long time,” he said. “To be observing other coaches, other programs and to be learning from some of the influences I mentioned. And somehow all of those things have influenced me to believe if you can make it fun, and if you can keep people healthy, they tend to get faster. People tend to improve. I don’t think that is a lesson about running only. I think it’s a lesson about a lot of different parts of life.”