Girl on the go

When Breanne Ball was 18 months old, her mother gave her the nickname "Breezy Britches." Rather than walk, she would run throughout their home at Ft. Drum, N.Y.

"She would just take off," said Barbie Ball, whose husband, a career U.S. Army officer, was then stationed at Ft. Drum.

As a second- and third-grader at Wheeler Elementary School, Breanne Ball would challenge boys to races. All who accepted lost, the ‘Iolani senior recalled with a smile.

Early this month, Ball, the reigning 800-meter state champion and one of the state’s top cross country runners, became the first girl coached by Jonathan Lyau, the Honolulu Marathon Hall of Fame inductee and former state high school track champion, to beat Lyau in a workout.

"She broke me," said the 47-year-old Lyau. The team was doing interval runs, covering distances from 1,000 meters down to 400. In the last 400-meter sprint, Ball stuck with Lyau, who has coached national-level female runners, and then passed him.

"Her strength, her power has really improved," said Lyau, ‘Iolani’s assistant girls cross country coach.

On Saturday at the Kapalua Village Golf Course on Maui, Ball, simply known as "Breezy" and "Bre," will be counting on her strength, power and signature finishing kick to try to achieve her goal of winning the state girls cross country championship.

She knows that doing so won’t be easy. Her two main competitors are underclassmen who won the past two years — Seabury Hall sophomore Dakota Grossman, the defending state champion, and Punahou junior Elli Brady, a three-time Interscholastic League of Honolulu champion who won the title in 2009.

Last year, Ball finished fourth in the state cross country meet, 29 seconds behind Grossman, who covered the 3-mile course in 19 minutes, 25.5 seconds. Brady was second with 19:37.4.

‘Iolani head girls coach Chet "The Jet" Blanton said that while Ball is a superb harrier, she is better as an 800-meter runner.

"The top cross country girls don’t want to let her get close during the last 400 meters," he said. They’re concerned, Blanton explained, about Ball’s finishing kick, which has caught the attention of collegiate track coaches at more than a dozen Division I schools who see her as an 800 specialist.

It was when Ball was a sixth-grader at St. Andrew’s Priory that her teachers noticed that she had a talent for running.

Barbie Ball remembers being contacted by physical education instructor, Mekia Ostrem, who told her: "I think Breanne has something. When she runs, she always finishes first, and she is never tired. She’s a natural runner. I would encourage her to run track."

At first, the suggestion was greeted unenthusiastically.

"I didn’t want to run track. I wanted to hang out with my friends, and play with my Barbies (Barbie dolls)," Breanne Ball recalled.

But as a seventh-grade Priory student representing Pac-Five, she did run. The result: ILH intermediate championships in the 800, 1,500 and 3,000 meters. She even qualified for the state meet in the 800.

Ball then transferred to ‘Iolani, where she sat out her first track season but began running cross country immediately.

Kelli Morrissey, who as an ‘Iolani senior finished 10th in the state cross country championship meet in 2009, remembers that early on, Ball showed that she could keep up with the upperclassmen in practice.

"She was always trying to top what she did the previous week," Morrissey, a valedictorian of her ‘Iolani class, said in a telephone interview from Duke, where she is a sophomore.

Last season, Ball won both the ILH and state 800-meter titles. The ILH crown was especially pleasing for Ball. It showed, she said, that she had the mental toughness to be a champion, by leading from start to finish and then breaking away over the last 120 meters.

"I kept telling myself, ‘I can do this. I can push myself. This is my race. I’m tired of being second,’ " Ball recalled, as her time of 2:15.88 broke an ILH record that had stood for 29 years.

Additional parent-aided practices were crucial to Ball’s championship journey. In midseason, when Ball realized that she wasn’t lowering her time as much as she wanted, she contacted a former coach, ‘Iolani graduate Robert Kessner, the ILH cross country runner of the year his senior season, for workout schedules she could do on her own. And her father, U.S. Army Col. Arthur Ball, who ran the 800 meters and cross country at West Point, marked off 200-, 300- and 400-meter distances on the half-mile circular roadway fronting their home for interval sprints after meets and on Sundays.

"A lot of tears were shed," Breanne Ball said of the workouts at home. "I thought my dad was mean, that he was trying to kill me."

But in about two weeks Ball found that her 800-meter time had fallen about 5 seconds to around the 2:15 mark.

"It all worked out for the best. And I would not be getting the opportunities I am getting now," she added.

Those opportunities include being wooed by the Division I track programs at Virginia, Virginia Tech, Cornell, Richmond, James Madison, Manhattan College, Texas Christian, Santa Clara, Pepperdine, University of San Francisco, Hawaii, Seattle and St. Joseph’s, and Division III Occidental.

Ball is also weighing the possibility of continuing a family tradition by selecting the U.S. Military Academy, where her brother, Brandon Ball, an ILH football honorable mention for ‘Iolani, is a junior, and from where an uncle and cousin graduated. Ball has already received a presidential nomination to West Point, and has been contacted by its track coach.