When it comes to college athletics, talent gets you in the door. Everything else is up to you.
Hard work is paramount, but it can be lonely and isolating. Teammates can help, but skill sets and commitment levels are different. Coaching helps. Even having the right training program helps.
But surrounding yourself with the right people? That's a huge step toward success. And living with a similar singular talent whose goals align with your own and you hold each other accountable at all times? That might be harbinger of success.
Karlijn Schouten and Kenisha Phillips don't have a ton of similarities to draw on athletically or in their backgrounds. Schouten is a pole vaulter from the Netherlands; Phillips is a sprinter from Guyana. There are not two more dissimilar events in the track and field landscape. There aren't many parts of the globe more dissimilar. Taking the boisterous Phillips, eager to burst into song at the first opportunity, and pairing her with the reserved Schouten would not, on its surface, be a recipe for success. But in two things—desire and talent—they are in lock-step.
"We both have a winning mindset," Phillips said. "Before competition, we're mentally preparing. We know what we have to do to get a good mark and prepare accordingly."
There have been teammate/roommate pairings of high levels of success throughout the years—Savannah Amato and Kristen Stucker, Brooke Armistead and Paige Smith, Bubba Wells and Jermaine Savage, the Ariza's, the Yanes Garcia's, to name but a few. But seldom have two strangers, coming from different corners of the globe, arrived in Clarksville sharing the same mindset—to dominate.
To take one singular talent from Georgetown, Guyana and another from Zwijndrecht, Netherlands and have them not just come to Austin Peay, but be paired as roommates and be able to push one another to the heights they wish to reach individually… it's not luck. Luck wouldn't be that kind. It's something else entirely. Fate, maybe.
"I was back home and one of my teammates went to another school in America," Schouten said of her route to the states. "I was not as good yet, but I really liked what she did and I got better, then I reached out to someone who specializes in getting people into school in America. He helped me to come here.
"We're both focused on what we want. Because we come from far away, there are a lot of people back home wanting us to do good, and we carry those expectations. We want to make them proud."
In addition to sharing both the talent and drive necessary to harbor hopes of representing their homelands on the world stage, they can share the isolating loneliness student-athletes sometimes suffer when half a world away from home. They have each other.
"With COVID, Kenisha couldn't go home last summer and I couldn't go home this winter," Schouten said. "We know how it feels to be away from home for so long."
Of course, like any roommates there are times that their… idiosyncrasies… become tough to ignore.
"Sometimes she thinks she can sing really well and sometimes it's really early and I want to sleep," Schouten said.
"If she doesn't see me for a day, she just comes knocking on my door," Phillips countered with a laugh. "I always tell her, if you want me just send a text or call me. But she'll just walk right past the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on my door, wake me up, just to say hello."
But when one does well, you can set your watch to the other having a standout day.
"It's funny," Schouten said. "When Kenisha gets a PR, it seems like I get a PR. When one of us does good, both of us seem to do good."
The duo are both inside the top-30 in the NCAA East Region in their respective events; barring injury or a groundswell of success around the region in the next few weeks, they'll both be in Jacksonville at the end of the month for the NCAA East Preliminary Round.
Would be a great time for another personal-best for both in their quest to reach Oregon for the national championships.
