{"id":2219,"date":"2016-04-27T11:23:41","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T15:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=2219"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:50","slug":"what-makes-ryan-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2016\/04\/what-makes-ryan-run\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes Ryan Run?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Cross-country running is a far more mentally challenging sport than a physically grueling one, says senior Ryan Flannery, three-time captain of Seton Hall\u2019s cross-country team and a top-five finisher in a raft of races he ran during his sophomore and junior seasons. He sees it as a test of character:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\u201cYou think your body can\u2019t do it, but it can. You have to keep telling yourself, \u2018keep going\u2019 as your body is breaking down. \u2018Keep going, keep going.\u2019 It\u2019s like life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Running through every kind of challenge might be a metaphor for Flannery\u2019s life so far. The son of a widowed mother, Michele, who works long hours at Wal-Mart, and brother to Sean, a cheerful young man with autism, Flannery understands the payoff of persistence. Indeed, he flirted with the idea of quitting the team from exhaustion his freshman year before going on to multiple triumphs.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"A Winning Blend of Talent and Grit\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/z-47DFKs1eQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The story is that Ryan arrived for training the August before his freshman year, out of shape by university-level competitive standards and not too sure of his talents. He considered himself a competent runner at Lacey Township High School in southern New Jersey, \u201cbut I wasn\u2019t like No. 1 in the state; I was not even No. 1 on my team.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But he\u2019d been recruited by Seton Hall\u2019s renowned track and cross-country coach John Moon, who saw something in him. \u201cI remember him being very adamant about believing in me,\u201d Flannery recalls of his first conversation with Coach Moon, a former Olympian and one the fastest humans on earth in the early 1960s.<\/p>\n<p>From 43 years of coaching experience, Moon says, \u201cYou can\u2019t tell from stats, you can\u2019t just look at a film and tell if a boy\u2019s dedicated.\u201d That takes a face-to-face conversation. And from the chat they had, Moon knew that the record of \u201ca just-average runner\u201d did \u201cnot reflect what he would become.\u201d He explains: \u201cThis guy, I mean, he was just motivated to excel.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Moon pushed, encouraged, trained and inspired Flannery, who hardened through a punishing 70- and 80-mile-a-week training regimen to finish his freshman year as a top competitor, not a dropout. Along the way, Moon became a mentor and father-figure for Flannery, whose own father had died of complications from alcoholism.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe developed a real bond,\u201d Moon relates, \u201cthrough talking over difficulties and personal issues.\u2009\u2026 Once he graduates, I feel like I\u2019m going to be losing a son.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The process also created an instinct for leadership, Flannery says, adding that he leads his teammates \u201cthrough example\u201d \u2014 on the track \u201cby screaming encouraging words\u201d and off the track in excellence in classroom work and personal standards.<\/p>\n<p>Flannery calls his motivational method \u201cworking through that mental bridge, knowing that you can do it,\u201d and applies it to his budding career as a radio deejay and sports announcer. At the College of Communication and the Arts, his concentration is in radio \u2014 an interest he brought from high school, where he called football and basketball games.<\/p>\n<p>Today, his on-air credits include being commentator for Seton Hall women\u2019s basketball and host of the Whatchu Been Missin\u2019 hip-hop show on WSOU. Working into the wee hours and training in the early morning, Flannery also found time to win a third-place prize (for a radio spot he created) in a nationwide contest organized by NextRadio and College Broadcasters Inc., as well as first-place honors for Best Sports Audio Play-by-Play at College Broadcasters\u2019 national convention in October.<\/p>\n<p>For the time being, though, the \u201cpinnacle\u201d of his college career was being named captain of the 15-man cross-country team, he says. Coach Moon (who tutored 19 Olympic athletes so far during his career) would agree: \u201cI just wish I could clone him and have him as team captain here for the next 40 years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cross-country running is a far more mentally challenging sport than a physically grueling one, says senior Ryan Flannery. He sees it as a test of character.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2016\/04\/what-makes-ryan-run\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What Makes Ryan Run?<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":2244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[258,10,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-2015-2019","category-sports","category-students","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2219"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2275,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2219\/revisions\/2275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}