Track S
BY MARK MOSCHETTI FOR GOHUSKIES MAGAZINE
he always dreamed of competing in a big-time college track and field program. But competing in five events on the same day? Or seven over two days? Hannah Rusnak hadn’t dreamed of that at all. “When my coach (former Husky assistant Pat Licari) was recruiting me, he said, ‘You’re a sprinter and jumper, and that’s what we look for. I think you’d be a really good athlete in the heptathlon,’ ” the University of Washington junior recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, cool — I’m fine with that.’ “I’d never even heard of it.” She has heard of it now. And the college track world — whether it’s within the confines of Husky Nation, or around the Pacific-12 Conference, or even throughout the country — has heard of her. “I had no clue what to expect,” Rusnak said of her first foray into multi-event competition, an indoor pentathlon at the UW Invitational on Jan. 26, 2018. “It was hard in the sense that it was an all-day thing. But I really kind of fell in love with it immediately from that.” Rusnak wound up 14th among 28 competitors on that January evening at the Dempsey Indoor facility. She has been going nowhere but up ever since, setting school records for both the indoor pentathlon and the outdoor heptathlon, winning the Pac-12 hep as a sophomore in 2019 and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation pent last winter as a junior.
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