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Runner has potential, but needs a chanceBy DARRELL FRY © St. Petersburg Times, published February 14, 2001 TAMPA -- Kerine Black is bent over, her hands resting on her thighs, her shoulder-length hair hanging in her face. She is only about halfway through this sprinting drill, but already she is exhausted. She playfully pleads to South Florida assistant track coach Greg Thiel to cut the drill short today, to drop the 100-meter sprints from six to four, but he doesn't budge. "Nope," he says, "we're doing all six." Actually, if it were up to Black, she probably would never stop running. She'd burst from those starting blocks, get to the end of the track and keep going. Running until she reached a place where track athletes receive celebrity and fortune commensurate with the years of sweat they pour into the sport. Running until she reached a place where the long arms of heartbreak and strife could no longer reach her family. Where she is now, none of that exists. She has loads of potential, but unlike the NBA where millions of dollars are thrown at underdeveloped players such as Michael Olowokandi, potential won't get you anywhere in track and field. She's a three-time NCAA All-American who competes in three events. Among amateur athletes nationally, Thiel estimates she's near the top 10 in the triple jump and, with a personal best of about 21 feet, is roughly a foot behind superstar Marion Jones in the long jump. And she's getting better. She started as a sophomore walk-on at USF and blossomed into one of the top collegiate athletes in the nation. She didn't learn to triple jump until the end of her senior year of high school in Fort Pierce, yet she'll be one of the favorites at the NCAA Outdoor Track Championships this summer. "Who knows what she could do?" Thiel said while trying to keep an eye on her as she ran the fifth of her six 100-meter sprints. "If Kerine were given the opportunity to focus only on training and not worry about paying bills, potentially she could be in the Olympics and be as good as any triple-jumper in the world. "She went from 38 feet and some change in high school to 44.3 now. She took her long jump from 18 or 19 (feet) to 21 now. And generally your prime years are 24 to 27. "My gosh, who knows what she could do if she had the opportunity to really go after it." The thing is, we might never know. For most track athletes to compete at their optimal levels after college, their training has to be their only job. Imagine Warren Sapp having to work the graveyard shift at the county jail (he was a criminology major) while going through training camp. Unless you're independently wealthy, which Black is not, you need financial support from the U.S. Olympic committee or a sponsor. Typically, Thiel said, the Olympic committee and sponsors only nurture the top three or four prospects in any event, not someone such as Black, who is outside the top five but has the potential for so much more. Then, of course, there's her family. Her parents never married and she didn't meet her father until she was 16. She was raised by her mother in Jamaica, but even their relationship isn't as warm and fuzzy as you might expect. Last year she was named USF Female Athlete of the Year, but her parents don't even know. You get the feeling from her that they probably couldn't care less. "My boyfriend and my cousin in New Jersey, they are the ones who always ask me about track and ask me how things are going," she said. Her family story offers more than that, but she is reluctant to share any of it publicly. She will admit, however, the situation has gotten so dire that as recently as this season she nearly packed her things, quit track and school, and went home. "There have been so many times I stayed up until four o'clock in the morning crying," she said. "So many times I came to practice crying." If things at home don't get better, she might have to forgo her dreams of continuing her track career after this season to help out. ... financially and emotionally. She is well-prepared for it. She already graduated with a degree in management information systems and has started on another degree in finance. And she has been on a couple of job interviews. She would rather, of course, keep running. All the way to Greece in 2004 or as far as her legs will take her. But it's not completely up to her. For her sake, hope she gets to keep at it, because the only thing that would be worse than her not making the Olympics would be never knowing if she could.
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