Schilling Takes Unconventional Path to Stardom

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — As a second-year student at the University of Virginia, Jenny Schilling competed for the running club on Grounds, unbeknownst to the coaches of UVA’s cross country and track & field programs.

As a third-year in 2023-24, Schilling joined those varsity teams and produced performances that almost defied belief. In the fall, she finished 39^th at the NCAA cross country meet to earn All-America honors. In the winter, she placed third in the 5,000 meters at the ACC indoor track & field meet, and she posted times in the 3,000 and the 5,000 that rank second all-time at UVA. In the spring, running outdoors, she set the school record for 10,000 meters.

“I’m biased, but I think it’s one of the cooler stories in the last 20 years in terms of running here at the University,” said Alec Lorenzoni, a former UVA runner who’s one of the owners of Ragged Mountain Running and Walking Shop on the Corner.

“It would be like Tony Bennett seeing some guy at Mem Gym, and then he ends up being first- or second-team All-ACC.”

Schilling arrived in Charlottesville in August 2021. As a first-year, she occasionally hit the gym to lift weights, but that was about the extent of her exercise program. She’d stopped running when the COVID-19 pandemic cut short her junior year of outdoor track at Heritage High School in Leesburg, and after cross country was canceled in the fall of her senior year, she quit altogether.

“I just lost my love for it,” Schilling recalled. “I was kind of burned out … My senior year I did not exercise at all, ever. I was just a total NARP”—an acronym for non-athletic regular person.

Little changed during her first year at UVA. But in the summer of 2022, Schilling decided to start running again and began training for the Georgetown Half Marathon in Washington, D.C.

Schilling was the first woman to cross the finish line in that race, posting a time of 1:26:50. It was not a competitive field, she said, “but I was like, ‘I guess I still kind of have this in me.’ And that’s when I sort of remembered that I enjoyed running and I enjoyed racing.”

Back in Charlottesville, she joined Club Running at UVA, a student-led group, “just because I wanted to join a social organization and make some friends, be a little more active,” Schilling said. “That was where I met some of my best friends that I’m still really, really close with.”

In the spring of her second year, she signed up for the Charlottesville Ten Miler. Schilling won that race, too, finishing a grueling course in 57:32.03, and head course coordinator Mark Lorenzoni, Alec’s father, took note. The elder Lorenzoni, who’s coach of the Charlottesville Track Club’s Ten Miler training program, approached Schilling after the race and asked if she was an undergrad at UVA.

When she replied in the affirmative, Lorenzoni “was like, ‘Why are you not on the [UVA] team? I don’t think any of the girls on the team could have run the time that you just ran,’ ” Schilling said.

“It was a very hilly course, and it was even faster than I thought I could run. I wasn’t training for it. I just went out and ran it. So it was very surprising to me, and then I think everybody else was kind of like, ‘Who is this girl that just won?’ ”

Mark Lorenzoni called Vin Lananna, UVA’s director of track & field and cross country, to tell him about Schilling’s feat, and the process of adding her to the roster began. Schilling joined the Cavaliers’ program as a walk-on in the summer of 2023 and began preparing for cross country season.

“My goal in August of last year was to be top seven [on the team],” Schilling said. “I told myself, ‘If I’m going to be on this team and I’m gonna dedicate all this time to this and I’m not on scholarship or anything, I’m only gonna do it if I’m actually contributing to the team. I’m not gonna spend all this time and effort on this team if it’s not getting me anywhere.’ And so then to be our top finisher [at the NCAA meet], I did not expect that.”

Nor did Lananna, at least not when Schilling joined the program. During his long coaching career, he said, “I’ve had some surprises, but not like that, from an actual formal running club. It’s usually been somebody who comes off a soccer team or a football team or something like that. I’ve had some great athletes [excel in track & field] along the way, but not the way Jenny did.”

Schilling, who’s now receiving some scholarship aid, is a computer science major in UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, with a minor in data science. She had internship this summer with Nike in Oregon, and it “was such a dream,” Schilling said.

She would be eligible to compete again for the Wahoos as a graduate student in 2025-26, but a job offer from Nike would be tough to turn down, Schilling said. “I loved working there, and that is 100 percent where I would like to go when I graduate, and that’s what I want to be doing.”

As a high school runner, Schilling posted solid times, but nothing that piqued the interest of UVA or other prominent programs. “They were not collegiate athlete-level good,” she said. “I was doing well in my district and in my subsection in my state, but I wasn’t a nationally ranked athlete. I wasn’t going to Foot Locker Nationals like all the other girls on the team here did.”

UVA was always the school that most interested Schilling, even if it didn’t offer her an opportunity to run competitively in college.

“It’s in-state, they have an amazing CS program,” she said, “and I knew that I could get in with my academics, but there was just no shot I was gonna get on the team.

“On paper, if you look at my times and compare them to the freshmen that we have this year, there is no reason that I would ever have been recruited to the UVA team. For cross country, we would run 5Ks. My PR for that was 18:24, and I think most of our freshmen this year have run low-17 or sub-17 for 5K. My mile PR was 5:11, and most of our girls have run sub 4:50. So it’s not even comparable.”

Schilling laughed. “So I wouldn’t have recruited me either.”

Which begs the question: How does a good-but-not-great high school runner transform herself into an elite Division I runner?

“I think a lot of it definitely has to do with age and just sort of developing,” Schilling said, “and I think too that the two-year break I took definitely helped. One hundred percent, it gave me an advantage over all these other collegiate athletes that have been running and pounding their bodies to the ground since they were in middle school. Meanwhile, I got this long, two-year break to let my body develop and recover. And so then when I got back into the running world, I had never had any injuries.”

That changed last spring. After running the 10,000m at the Raleigh Relays in North Carolina, where her time of 32:44.19 broke the school record of 32:58.64 set by Patty Matava in 1987, Schilling developed a sacral stress fracture. The injury ended her outdoor season and kept her from running for 10 weeks, but she’s  healthy now and looking to build on her standout 2023 cross country season.

The Hoos are hosting the Virginia Invitational on Saturday at their home course, Panorama Farms in Earlysville. The men’s race, an 8k, starts at 8:45 a.m., and the women’s race, a 5k, follows at 9:30 a.m.

Last year’s NCAA cross country meets were held at Panorama Farms, where the UVA women placed 15^th and the men 22^nd. Many of the Cavaliers’ top runners are back this year, and the women were picked to finish second and the men fourth in the ACC.

“If everybody stays healthy and we just make normal progress and pay attention to the process, then we ought to be pretty good,” Lananna said.

For Schilling, much has changed over the past year. No longer is she an unheralded walk-on at UVA. She stops by the Ragged Mountain store from time to time and remains grateful for the role the Lorenzonis have played in her college career.

The path she followed was an unconventional one, but “I wouldn’t have done it any differently,” Schilling said.

“I am so grateful and I recognize how much privilege I have to have done the first two years as just a non-athlete. I personally feel that I had the best sort of experience at UVA that I could have had, but I know that that’s not really possible for most people. You can’t just decide to stop running and then walk on to a team. It doesn’t work that way for most people.”

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