Inside Haftu Strintzos’ journey from Ethiopia to Australia to Villanova cross-country star

Not many NCAA All-Americans could just as easily have been shepherds, but Haftu Strintzos was a grandmother’s intervention away.

Instead, the Villanova graduate student will race Friday in the Mid-Atlantic Regional at Penn State, where the Wildcats are favored to advance to the NCAA championships the following weekend in Stillwater, Okla. Strintzos is the Wildcats’ top distance runner, finishing second at the Big East Championships two weeks ago by finishing the 8,000 meters in 23 minutes, 21 seconds.

Before Strintzos became one of the most successful cross-country runners in Villanova history, he was an orphaned 7-year-old in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

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“[Tigray is a] very impoverished environment,” Strintzos said. “I didn’t really have much growing up. Getting two meals a day was a privilege. Often, I didn’t have shoes, either.”

Like many others his age in Tigray, Strintzos worked to help his family. They farmed, growing wheat, sorghum, and corn, and Strintzos was responsible for shepherding sheep, oxen, and cattle. After his parents died, some family members encouraged him to stop going to school and focus on the farm, but his grandmother stepped in to enforce the importance of education.

That decision opened up opportunities. Strintzos had become familiar with an Australian woman named Maria who had volunteered in Tigray for more than 30 years. Maria had helped countless orphans through her work, and when she met Strintzos, she knew she wanted to adopt him.

Strintzos wouldn’t have been eligible for adoption if he was no longer in school. Instead, the then-10-year-old went home with Maria to Australia, taking her last name in the process.

In Melbourne, Strintzos discovered distance running. Because of his time spent shepherding in Tigray’s high altitudes and harsh terrain, Strintzos had been inadvertently training for years.

With formal instruction, particularly under Australian Olympian Craig Mottram in high school, Strintzos became a top distance runner. Villanova watched from afar, believing that he could be next in a tradition of talented Australian distance runners at the school. However, that pipeline wasn’t what convinced his adoptive mother to let Strintzos go to Villanova.

“[Maria] felt an enormous responsibility to make sure she was going to put him [in the right place] in the next step of his life,” Villanova coach Marcus O’Sullivan said. “This wasn’t just a randomly picked school. For her, having a Christian background, having a good academic school, [would] get him ready for the next stages in life.”

Strintzos’ athletic ability was clear from the second he stepped on campus. In his debut at the Paul Short Run, he finished 13th out of 392 runners. He has only improved since then, culminating in a ninth-place finish at the NCAA championships last season.

Strintzos excelled academically as well. An electrical engineering major, he showed O’Sullivan he could manage the workload by earning a 3.3 grade point average his first semester.

He is thankful for all he has accomplished, realizing how different his life could have been if not for his grandmother.

If he hadn’t stayed in school, he likely would still be in Tigray, where a brutal civil war raged for the last two years. Strintzos hurts for his family in the region, with whom he hasn’t had contact in a year and a half. If he had stayed, he says he likely would have been drawn into the conflict.

A temporary peace was reached Nov. 2, and Strintzos is cautiously optimistic that this cease-fire is the one that ends the conflict for good.

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“I really hope this is the one,” Strintzos said, “because people need it most right now.”

As Strintzos leads Villanova deeper into the postseason, he draws strength from his family, both in Tigray and in Australia.

“I’m in a position of privilege, the way I see it, of privilege and opportunity because I could be in a very different situation right now,” Strintzos said. “So I tried to keep that in mind, with what my family could potentially be going through right now. If they could go through that, why can’t I?”