Meet the Warriors: Thaddeus Kowalik, Jr.

By Tim Heiduk

(SANTA BARBARA, Calif.) Westmont men’s cross country and track & field senior Thaddeus Kowalik, Jr. wasn’t always a runner. He only turned to running when his previous sport, basketball, didn’t work out for him in high school.

“I started out as a basketball player through middle school,” said the 5-foot-8 Kowalik. “I decided I was short and couldn’t make it on the basketball team because I got cut. I went to a huge high school of 4,000 kids in Colorado. It just wasn’t working out doing basketball. I was always the first one running around the school when the coach told us to run when we didn’t do our workout well, so, ‘Okay, I’ll do track.’”

After initially considering playing lacrosse because he had some friends on the team, Kowalik decided to run track. He was able to translate his defensive skills in basketball to his craft as a runner.

“I didn’t have any runner friends; I was just good at it,” Kowalik said. “My specialty in basketball was my defense. I wasn’t that great of a shooter; I was okay. To be good at defense, you just need to stay up, stay there and be a pain in the butt. I had the stamina and that’s kind of what a runner is, going back and forth across the court instead of just going straight the whole time.”

On the Cherry Creek H.S. track & field team, Kowalik stepped up to run events that were less than desirable for others.

“I was always the guy who ran the two mile or the long event that nobody else wanted to run, just because I wanted a spot on the varsity team,” Kowalik said. “It was still a big team on track and cross country. I started out my freshman year of high school and kept growing from there.”

Kowalik didn’t decide he wanted to run in college until late in his selection process.

“It was very late,” Kowalik said on his decision to run in college. “I talked to Coach Smelley in March before I decided on going to Westmont. I decided on Westmont late too, like in May. I really wanted to focus on school and go to an engineering school until I realized that it would be weird to go through a day of school and not go running at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. I called Coach Smelley and he said, ‘Sure, you’re in.’ I trained in the summer starting in June, two months before coming to Westmont.”

In addition to Westmont’s small community, what made the college so appealing to him was its location in Santa Barbara.

“There’s a show called Psych that takes place in Santa Barbara,” Kowalik said. “I made a list of places in the world that I’d either want to travel to or live, and Santa Barbara was on the list because of that show.”

Santa Barbara was also appealing to him because it offered him an escape from the cold weather he had grown up with in Denver.

“I’ve had enough of the cold in Denver,” Kowalik said. “At one time in high school, I was allergic to cold and severe changes in temperature. I would ice my knee because it hurt and my knee would just swell up. I actually passed out after an ice bath because my legs had hives. That only lasted like six months, but that was right as I was deciding college. I thought maybe I should get out of the cold for a bit.”

When he arrived at Westmont in August of 2017, it turns out his first friend on campus was someone else who got away from the Colorado cold – Michael Oldach, who was a sophomore at the time.

“He’s the first face that I saw at Westmont,” Kowalik said of the two-time Golden State Athletic Conference individual cross country champion. “I didn’t know what I was in for. I did visit one time, but other than that one time, I really didn’t meet anyone on the team.

“I didn’t know who that I knew from my first time visiting Westmont was going to still be there. I didn’t know anybody. My parents sent me on a plane and I was like, ‘Alright, I’m going.’ I showed up with two bags and Michael showed up in his car. He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m from Colorado too.’

“He walked me around Westmont and it took us probably a year to really start investing in each other as brothers in Christ and getting to connect to each other with our hobbies. Ever since then he’s been one of my most consistent friends, probably the closest thing I’ve ever had to a brother.”

Kowalik’s and Oldach’s friendship goes well beyond the course and the track, as the two have a band together.

“We have a band, it’s called The Banana Conspiracy,” Kowalik said. “I play the electric guitar. Michael plays acoustic guitar and he’s the singer too. It’s just the two of us right now and we’re looking for a drummer.

“We had one show, it was the Page Battle of the Bands type thing we had in February of this year, but two weeks after that, Covid hit and no more live music for a long time. It’s kind of disappointing; we had a couple bangers.”

Kowalik, an engineering physics and philosophy double major, recently decided that he hopes to one day combine his passion for engineering and music into a career and design his own circuits and guitar panels.

“You plug your electric guitar in and it goes to the amplifier and they change the sound of your guitar,” Kowalik explained of the circuits and guitar panels he wants to design. “There’s kind of a niche market for it for guitar players. They can get really expensive and they’re really popular right now.”

His interest in engineering began with a project he worked on in high school.

“In high school, we set up a team in our engineering physics class that I had and we made a glucose monitor that was laser induced,” Kowalik said. “It would shine a laser at a solution of water and it’ll tell you the concentration of glucose and we thought that would be useful for diabetic patients to get a non-invasive glucose monitor.

“It’s kind of crazy that we were doing that in high school. I was on the team where we had to set up this gear contraption, move the transducer around all 360 degrees and what not. I came up with the design and I had fun with it.”

Kowalik recently decided to add philosophy as a second major, after initially minoring in it because he really liked his Philosophical Perspectives class with Dr. Mark Nelson.

“I realized that the questions that I would ask myself late at night or when I’m on a drive and I’m thinking deep thoughts, those are actually questions people in history have talked about from Plato all the way until now,” Kowalik said. “I would talk to my professors and have really cool connections with them, like ‘What about this kind of thing?’ They’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, this guy wrote about that and you should read this.’ I realized I was only a couple classes off the full major.”

Westmont cross country and track & field head coach Russell Smelley has noticed Kowalik’s philosophical side, both during and outside competition.

“I enjoy Thaddeus because of his serious demeanor and earnest desire to understand why he does things and what he needs to do to fulfill his capabilities as an individual and as a runner,” Smelley said. “We are able to have philosophical discussions, personal debates and vulnerable conversations. He is an introspective person, so learning how to draw him out into meaningful conversation has been a good exercise in patience with the payoff of a meaningful relationship.”

Going to Westmont not only allowed Kowalik to pursue his academic interests, but it enabled him to be called by his actual name as opposed to his middle name, something that was not the case growing up.

“I used to go by my middle name because it was confusing in the house - my dad was Thad and I was Stefan, my middle name,” Kowalik said. “I changed that when I came to college for the first time. I wanted to be Thaddeus. I thought it sounded cooler, people liked calling me it more and I liked hearing it more, so I decided to do that.

“My dad was proud of me for it. He said, ‘It’s a great name. People will remember it.’ That’s true, so I’m happy to have it. Maybe my son one day will be Thaddeus III.”

People have indeed remembered his name, as Kowalik has consistently improved on the course and the track throughout his Westmont career, both in his race times and how he approaches competitions.

In cross country, Kowalik placed 35th at the GSAC Championships as a freshman and 22nd as a sophomore, before he cracked the top-20 as a junior.

“I’ve had to learn that what matters is what happens in the race and nothing that you do before the race or after the race changes what happens in the race,” Kowalik said. “You can train for it and that will definitely help, and that’s what we try to do every other day that we’re not racing, but when you’re in the race, the only thing that can get you through is the decisions that you make in the race and the performance that you have there.”

Kowalik’s growth was especially evident during the track & field season in 2019, when as a sophomore he placed third at the GSAC Championships in the 3,000m steeplechase to earn All-Conference honors. Kowalik was hoping to qualify for the NAIA Outdoor National Championships in a qualifying race, but he unfortunately suffered an injury that prevented him from finishing the race.

“I had a great season my sophomore year of track season,” Kowalik said. “My last race was a qualifier for the national championships. I had a lap to go in the 3,000m steeplechase, jumped over a steeple barrier, landed kind of weird and tore three ligaments in my foot. I just collapsed on the ground and couldn’t finish the race.

“I was on pace for a wild time that my training didn’t indicate that I could do, but I did it just because I ran and that came from the decision of not worrying about what I think that I can do, but just trying in that moment and just going for it.

“I didn’t get to run all that next summer because I was hurt. I didn’t have good training, but still managed to improve on my seasons from before last cross country season and that was again just mental decisions more than training.”

The injury he suffered in that race did nothing to damper his love for the steeplechase, which he said is his favorite track event.

“I love it,” Kowalik said of the steeplechase. “That fits into the theme of playing defense in basketball or running headfirst into whatever coach tells you to do. At this level, probably up until the level of upper D1 athletes, your training can’t transcend what you can do in your mind. So being really tough at it, just like, ‘Next barrier, next barrier, next barrier’ and only doing the next step, that can take you extremely far.

“Having the blind willingness to go for it really lends itself to the steeplechase because we don’t have fast-twitch muscles here on the distance track team, but you’re going to have to build a little bit of it when you do the steeplechase.

“You get tired like you’re doing power reps or doing suicides because you’re making quick movements every 20 or 30 seconds to get over the barrier, but you’re also doing a 10-minute long race when you’re moving at an interval pace. You have to trick your mind that you’re not actually as tired as you feel.”

His love for the steeplechase made the cancellation of the 2020 outdoor track & field season that much more disappointing.

“We were all kind of floundering at that moment,” Kowalik said. “Coach (Smelley) gave us a full training regimen to do, two to three workouts a week as if we were going into competition season, but we would be doing that with no competitions to look forward to.”

“There’s no other teammates in Colorado,” continued Kowalik, who missed training with his teammates and going to the Dining Commons with them afterward. “It was tough looking forward and running without a finish line.”

Amid the uncertainty of whether there would be a fall cross country season and the prospect of more online classes, Kowalik considered taking time off from Westmont.

“I was actually considering not coming back to Westmont this semester or this year, just because I have a hard time with the online classes,” Kowalik said. “I’ve identified the difficulty, that you’re at home all day doing class, then you have to go home and do homework, even though you’re in the same spot. It totally messes with your psychology and I don’t think I’m alone in that.”

Kowalik ultimately decided to come back this year and is happy that he did. What has helped him push through the challenges he has faced this year are the lessons he has learned from running.

“I believe the mind can make your body do anything,” Kowalik said. “As long as you really focus on something, when it comes to getting caught up on your homework that you got behind on or dealing with something tough that happens in your life, with running as well as anything else – patience, time and enough focus and determination, with some good friends along, can really get you past whatever life might throw at you.”

As one of only two seniors to have competed so far this cross country season, along with Chris Hanessian, Kowalik has had the opportunity this year to impart some of those lessons onto a young team, which consists of 10 freshmen and six sophomores. He has been able to take the underclassmen under his wing, just like Oldach did for him.

“Thaddeus has gone through a similar mental and emotional processing about leadership as he does about his training,” Smelley said. “As he came to realize his leadership capability and responsibility as a senior, he stepped into the role in an active manner. He has engaged with the team about what it takes to be successful.”

Kowalik said the team culture has shifted a bit from his freshman year, when there were a lot of seniors and not many underclassmen, compared to this year, when the opposite is true. However, he’s enjoying the experience.

“There’s a lot of silliness involved because there’s so many of them (young runners), but I love it that way,” Kowalik said. “It feels like they’re kind of our kids, Chris and I, which is fun.”

With the young team, Kowalik said this group is not as caught up as it was in his first three years on beating The Master’s, who has won 10-straight GSAC championships.

“Just like the race they ran too long on, they were just running hard, getting fit and having fun,” Kowalik said in reference to the Westmont Tri-Meet, when two younger Warrior runners took a wrong turn on the course. “That’s the priority that is invaluable to have compared to the last couple years.”

That is a perspective that Kowalik has learned to embrace throughout his time at Westmont.

“I’ve really learned the important things as far as what I want my life to look like,” Kowalik said of his Westmont experience. “I chose physics and engineering based pretty much on what I’d be good at and what I thought would get me a job later on in life. I’ve learned that that’s not what I want to care about and therefore I don’t care about it.

“The people involved at Westmont have really changed my perspective on what life is all about. I don’t need to have a lot of money or be successful or run 1,200 miles in a week to be happy and be fulfilled.”

That mindset, however, has not wavered Kowalik from the confidence he has in himself and his team going into the Warriors’ final tune-up meet this weekend before the GSAC Championships on Nov. 7.

“I’ve always performed well under pressure,” Kowalik said. “Maybe I have a little bit of blind confidence, but that’s all you really need to do well. You just need to go, get scared, be okay that you’re scared and keep running anyway.”

As he reflects on his time as a Warrior, Kowalik is appreciative of the impact the cross country and track & field teams have had on him.

“The team has been instrumental in pushing me through the really tough times that I’ve experienced as an athlete here,” Kowalik said. “Freshman year there were plenty of workouts that I had no idea what I was doing and I would feel bad for myself and kind of give up on a workout, but then I learned to not give up, with my teammates there and Coach (Smelley) pulling me along.

“That really helped me get through the harder things like my foot injury, not finishing my season and my race, and still coming out in the end with a good season last year and this year, even with some setbacks.”

Just as his older teammates and coaches have impacted him, he’s having that same impact on others right now.

Kowalik and the Westmont men’s cross country team race Saturday in Rocklin at the WJU Warrior Invitational, with their race scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. following the women’s race which is set for 8:45 a.m. Both races can be live streamed at: https://portal.stretchinternet.com/jessup/