The 2011 Badger Season Opener, an annual September 6K tune-up meet for the University of Wisconsin, was the launching point for one of the most improbable college running careers ever.
It was there that Michael Van Voorhis, who had an undistinguished high school career—he was a 4:23 miler and 9:44 two-miler and qualified for the Minnesota state cross country meet once—finished fifth overall in the race, besting nine of the 11 official Wisconsin athletes, putting Wisconsin coach Mick Byrne in a perplexing situation.
“I was not exactly dreading the call,” said Mick Byrne, University of Wisconsin director of track & field and cross country. “But I saw that Van Voorhis had beaten some of the guys we’d recruited. I get in Monday morning and he’s waiting for me.”
Byrne had told Van Voorhis a year earlier, when he was an incoming freshman in August of 2010, that he wasn’t D1 material, and recommended he run with Wisconsin Track Club for a year. Byrne wrote in his email that if Van Voorhis improved enough, he might have a shot in fall 2011.
Only one problem: Byrne had finalized his roster the week before the Badger Season Opener.
“I kick him out of my office and say, ‘Sorry kid, if you’d come last week you might have had a shot.’ This is not the Little League where you give everyone a lollipop and make them feel good,” Byrne recounts.
But through his bluster, Byrne saw qualities he liked—toughness, an unwillingness to back down, work ethic, in addition to decent talent—and he decided to try to get Van Voorhis on the team.
“I liked that the kid came to me and asked for a spot on the team,” said Byrne. “What’s the worst that could happen? He stinks up the place and we get rid of him. I knew Barry Alvarez [the athletic director] would like this story because the football team is full of walk-ons. Barry says, ‘Heck yeah, let him on,’ and makes an extra roster spot.
Wisconsin is currently ranked 19th in the country, Van Voorhis has been running as the No. 2 man for the Badgers all season.
“In my six years at Wisconsin, no guy has come up from Wisconsin Track Club and been that successful, and it’s very unlikely ever in Wisconsin history,” said Byrne.
A math and science enthusiast and lifelong vegetarian, Van Voorhis started running with his mom in seventh grade, and with the St. Paul Central High School cross country team as a ninth grader. The coach at the time, Mike Stoick, remembered Van Voorhis as a scrawny kid, a hard worker who always tried to run with the older guys. He made varsity as a 5’10”, 130-pound junior. The team ran 45 to 55 miles per week during cross country but Van Voorhis usually tacked on a few more. Like many high school athletes, he tended to go out hard and fade in races, so Stoick counseled him to hold back and not go out with the leaders.
“That was my mistake and I told him so,” said Stoick. “I was essentially saying he wasn’t good enough to run with those guys. In the state meet his senior year, he finished 29th and the guy he’d been training with all season finished third.
Gaining confidence, if not weight, Van Voorhis set the school record in the mile in the spring of his senior year. “His progression was nowhere close to being done,” said Stoick.
Van Voorhis had already decided on Wisconsin for academic and financial reasons, and had heard, somewhere, it was possible to walk on there. He set about making it possible, hitting a peak week of 73 miles on two-a-days, and posting a 26:30 8K. In August, he sent Byrne an email detailing his PRs, and later, received Byrne’s Wisconsin Track Club recommendation.
“I took it as a challenge to work my ass off and make the team,” said Van Voorhis. “I was glad he mentioned WTC, because I’d never heard of them. At the time, I didn’t know almost no one gets brought up from WTC—I assumed Mick was giving me a viable alternative.”
Van Voorhis can’t say enough good about his fellow WTC runners or the volunteer coach, Jim Reardon, who could have taken offense when he made it clear he planned to use the club as a steppingstone. “OK, I can get you there,” Reardon told him.
Meeting with Reardon just twice a week, Van Voorhis built mileage in the fall, then cut way back in the spring, logging only 35 miles per week of searing intensity. It seemed to be working, as he ran a 5K that spring in a huge PR of 15:01. The summer after his freshman year, Van Voorhis stayed in Madison, took organic chemistry, worked in a research lab and ran 85 miles per week. He’d also grown an inch over the past year.
“One of my greatest strengths is that I’m not prone to injury,” he said. “I’ve basically had eight years of consistent training.”
On September 9, 2011, Van Voorhis ran 18:29 at that Badger Opener. It wasn’t so much the time, nor the fact he’d beaten so many Wisconsin runners (they treated the Badger Opener as a workout) that got Byrne’s attention.
“No doubt, he was a bit of a late bloomer—even when he came to my office as a sophomore, he looked like he was fifteen,” said Byrne. “But Michael believes in himself. Some guys freak out when challenged to prove themselves; he didn’t freak out. He loves the training, he loves to get after it.”
Once Byrne made room on the roster and Van Voorhis joined the Badgers, he PRed in almost every hard session. “I was working out every day with the likes of Maverick Darling, Reed Connor and Mohammed Ahmed, thinking, ‘I’m a WTC guy running on the Badger team,’ rather than, ‘I was a WTC guy, and now I’m a Badger.’ ” Van Voorhis said.
That first year was exhausting and unpleasant, but necessary: He had to learn for himself that he belonged. In fact, it wasn’t until spring 2013 that he felt like a contributing Badger.
It also took time for the team to accept him. “They were already friends; I was definitely an outsider,” Van Voorhis said. An outsider who was taking a top seven spot, no less.
“Did he have a chip on his shoulder? Is the Pope Catholic?” said Byrne. “Michael was a pain in the butt. But a lovable pain in the butt. He definitely felt he had something to prove.”
After a productive summer of 2013— he had a paid internship and was living and running on his own—Van Voorhis now sees the rough transitions from high school to college and club runner to Badger in his rear view mirror. “It doesn’t matter where I came from,” he said. “We’re all Badgers now.”
Wisconsin hosts the Midwest regional meet, which the men’s team has won the last nine years in a row, on Nov. 15. The NCAA championship is Nov. 23 in Terre Haute, Ind. Since 1999, the Badgers have won the title twice and been the runner-up six times.
