Track Star: Hannah Rusnak

BY MARK MOSCHETTI FOR GOHUSKIES MAGAZINE

She 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.

“Some athletes come into the university system as single- or double-event athletes — and all of a sudden find out that they’re really talented in a lot of areas, said UW associate head coach Toby Stevenson, who joined the staff prior to Rusnak’s sophomore year. “She’s just super-competitive, really driven to be good,” he added. “I just know that from Day One, everything she did she wanted to get better at. Every day she comes to practice not just to come to practice, but wanting to get better.”

Growing up in the northwest Washington town of Lynden, just 12 miles away from the nearest border crossing between the United States and Canada, Rusnak often would watch older brother Nathan at track practice. Nathan was in 7th grade at the time; Hannah was in 5th, and sometimes, “I would do hurdles with him.”

Suffice to say, the sport got a grip on her. By the time she finished her acclaim-filled career at Lynden Christian High School in 2017, she had six Washington Class 1A (small school) state championships, with three of those in the 100-meter hurdles, two in the long jump, and one as the anchor runner on the title-winning 4-by-100-meters relay. In fact, she ran the 100 hurdles 62 times for the Lyncs, and won 58 of those races. She long jumped 44 times, winning 36.

Even with her affinity for the pentathlon and heptathlon, Rusnak’s preference for those two events hasn’t changed. “If I’m not in a multi, I’ll do hurdles and long jump pretty much every time,” she said.

Rusnak also was an outstanding volleyball player at Lynden Christian and was an All-Northwest Conference first-team selection as an outside hitter. But when it was time to choose which sport to pursue — and at which level to pursue it — she knew what she wanted to do. “With track, I really like how it was a team sport, but also very individual,” she said. “I wanted to go to a big school — I wanted to break out of the small town. I knew D1 was where I wanted to go, and I could see myself excelling there.”

Rusnak started excelling almost immediately. In 2018, she set the UW freshman record in the heptathlon, scoring 4,934 points at the Pac12 Multi-Events — also the fifth-highest score in school history. Earlier that year, she moved into the No. 10 spot on the UW pentathlon list with 3,550 points at the MPSF meet.

It was between her freshman and sophomore seasons when Maurica and Andy Powell took the UW reins, Maurica as program director and Andy as head coach. Less than a month later, Toby Stevenson came aboard as the associate head coach, focusing on multis and jumps. Rusnak might not have known it right at that moment, but her transition into being a national-caliber performer was about to begin.

“When he came along, he kind of changed absolutely everything I knew — but obviously for the better,” she said. “My form in the hurdles and long jump and high jump, and even just running. He said we were going to start from Square One with me. We were able to work together to make me the athlete that I am today and get my full potential out of me.”

That was readily apparent from the start of her sophomore season in 2019. Rusnak was runner-up in the MPSF pentathlon with 3,848 points, No. 3 all-time for the Huskies. Just a few months later, she became the best heptathlete in school history, scoring 5,762 points to win the Pac-12 championship. Rusnak went on to the NCAAs, tallying 5,779 to place ninth — just 14 points shy of a top-8 spot on the awards podium. “The (Pac-12 hep) was just a lot of fun because I was hitting my events and doing what I needed to do,” she said. “At the end and just all the way through, it worked out.”

Rusnak was hoping for even more last year, and qualified for the NCAA indoor pentathlon. She was one of 13 Huskies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the nationals, and had just checked in implements when she got word that the meet had been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“In the back of my head, we kind of knew that could happen,” she said. “Literally 30 seconds (after checking in her implement), I walked past my coach, he was on the phone, and said, ‘Go pick it up. We’re done.’”

She and the rest of the Huskies were done for the next several months. No practice, no team activities, no meets. Rusnak went home to Lynden and trained on her own until finally being able to return in October. “I didn’t have a high jump pit; I didn’t have implements to throw the shot put or javelin. What I did focus on was a lot of form work and running,” she said. “Obviously, I could work on cardio and strength. It was just (trying to) stay with the motion of everything. Muscle memory is a big part of the event.”

Returning to practice — even in sociallydistanced pods — offered at least some sense of normalcy. “It’s (back in) the groove, but it’s a new groove,” she said. “It’s different than what it has been. But you just have to roll with the punches.” The 22-year-old Rusnak, sociology major focusing on the law-society-justice side of that field, still has plenty of upside to put on display whenever competition resumes. ”We’re not through yet,” associate coach Stevenson said. “The beauty of it now is we’re not building her up — we’re fine-tuning. You build the engine and get it running — that’s the baseline. We’ve been there and done that. Now we’re tuning it up.”

“That’s what’s going to be really fun to see.”