For this St. Joe’s relay, the A-10 championships were ‘like Lionel Messi trying to get the World Cup’

With just 100 meters left in the first leg of the men’s 4x800 relay at the Atlantic 10 championships, St. Joseph’s senior Gavin Campbell was in fourth place. By the time he completed the handoff with Graham Phillips, the Hawks were in first.

The Hawks maintained their lead as Phillips and fellow junior Josh Thaler completed the second and third legs before senior Owen Moelter solidified their victory. With a finish of 7 minutes, 29.85 seconds, St. Joe’s finished three seconds before second-place Loyola Chicago on May 5.

“This has been what we’ve been working for. It’s our No. 1 goal,” Moelter said. “We won a pretty big meet in the 4x800 last year, but winning your conference title in a certain event, especially a relay event that requires everybody in your event group to perform at their best, it’s really special and something we’ve been working toward the whole four years we’ve been here.”

While podium finishes are nothing new for the Hawks, the gold had been just out of reach for the relay team, which Moelter said has won silver three other times.

“It’s demoralizing, on the one hand,” Campbell said. “On the other, though, you come back and you’re like, ‘Well, we know we’re good enough to be on the podium, but we come up just short.’”

Moelter added that if they were to be content with silver, that would mean they’re content with being second best.

“If you’re not going to take it as motivation to one-up yourself and get gold, what are you doing with it?” Moelter said. “In our sport, especially, it’s just who’s the fastest, and it’s pretty plain and simple. We wanted to be the best, and we finally were able to get there.”

But it meant more than just the medal.

“We got our coach [Chris Tarello] to smile in a picture for the first time,” Phillips joked. “He hates getting second, and it was great to do it for him.”

St. Joe’s director of track Mike Glavin credited Tarello and the athletes for the relay’s success.

“What they did is put their heads down for the last three or four years, believe in the program, in particular believe in the training system that Chris Tarello uses,” Glavin said. “He works very, very specifically with those middle-distance runners, and they believed in all of that.”

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Along with implementing yearly goals, Moelter said Tarello creates a four-year plan to help the middle-distance runners become their best by their senior year.

“For something like this to come together proves there’s a method to his madness and that he really knows what he’s doing,” Moelter said. “We’ve known it because we’ve seen progress this whole time.”

And it has paid off for the group which, along with the first place finish at A-10s, finished third in the college men’s 4x800 at the Penn Relays and set a school record in a second-place finish at the indoor IC4A championships (7:29.65) this season. Last season, three of the four won gold at the IC4A outdoor championships and broke the outdoor school record with a 7:24.86 finish.

“At this point, we had an IC4A gold, which is the other postseason meet we have, set our outdoor school record; we’d set our indoor school record. So it was kind of like Lionel Messi trying to get the World Cup, but much dimmed down from that,” Campbell said. “It was the one thing we still hadn’t done yet that we wanted to do. So it just really brought together like we’ve accomplished almost everything we’ve set out to do at this point.”

Campbell, Moelter, and Thaler were part of last year’s outdoor record-breaking relay, while Phillips was added to the relay this season. The two seniors called Thaler and Phillips a “critical” part of what they do.

“In the past two races, [Phillips has] had the fastest split out of all of us on both of them. Just speaking to people stepping up,” Moelter said. “And Josh has been pretty consistently splitting great times on relays and helping us out.”

Phillips said he and Thaler forged a connection through being the only two freshmen in the middle-distance group when they arrived in 2021, while Campbell and Moelter have a rich history, having raced against each other for nearly 10 years.

“Since we’ve been running, we’ve been trying to be better than the other, and it’s done great things by pushing us to be better, to get to where we are,” Campbell said. “When we get on a relay [and] we’re not going against each other, it tends to do a lot more good than it does bad.”

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This past weekend, the Hawks took second place in the 4x800 at the IC4A outdoor championships with their 7:29.11 finish, just three-tenths of a second out of first. In the 800, both Campbell and Phillips set personal records with times of 1:51.52 and 1:52.63, respectively. Moelter finished with a season-best 1:51.76.

Now, Glavin is looking for the program to expand upon what the 4x800 relay has accomplished.

“We’re looking to do it in long sprints like the 200 and the 400. We’re looking to do it middle distance. We’re looking to do it and have been doing it some in the 1,500 and up, so it’s exactly what we were about,” Glavin said, “Right now they’re the highlight of what we’re about.”