Fluency in Mandarin Chinese among freshman runner's many talents

Already an impact performer for the men’s cross country team, Ty McCormack has demonstrated in other avenues, and just as impressively, that he isn’t your garden-variety college freshman.

Take for (perhaps the most exotic) example, the Gainesville, GA native’s fluency in Mandarin Chinese.

“It’s a passion of mine,” said McCormack, who earlier this month won the men’s 5K at the Gamecock Cross Country Invitational, and helped enable a Clemson sweep. “I’m majoring in Chinese (language and international trade) right now, and, hopefully, one day I’ll be able to work in China.”

McCormack took a course in Chinese as a freshman in (North Hall) high school, and studied the language intensively until he graduated. Realizing McCormack’s aptitude, his high school instructor encouraged him to attend Chinese festivals in the Atlanta area, and eventually arranged for McCormack to host a Chinese foreign-exchange student. This past summer, McCormack visited China and was reciprocally hosted by the same student. Immersive in both a social and academic sense, the trip only increased his facility with a language that’s come easily to him after an initial barrier.

“At first there’s just the shock of Chinese, because obviously the characters look nothing like English,” he explained. “Whereas, in Spanish, you know the letters and can just recognize the general pattern of writing. Chinese has radicals rather than letters, and they’re used in kind of the same way. But once you learn that, I actually thought it was pretty easy.

“Ten-thousand words are needed for fluency in English, and in Chinese it’s only two-thousand. It just kind of came naturally to me.”

The same could be said for McCormack’s relationship to distance running. A basketball and football player previously, he didn‘t take up running until 2008.

“Our football coach encouraged us to do track, just to stay in shape,” said McCormack. “Someone on the team bet me that I couldn’t run a mile in under five minutes, so I decided that would be my goal, and just kept working towards it. By the end of the year I could do it, and a lot of the older guys were telling me to come out for cross country. With football, I looked at myself honestly and realized that I may be able to play on the high school level, but where am I going after that?”

The conversion to running was quickly and dramatically rewarded, and in 2009 culminated in McCormack winning the USA Junior Olympics Cross Country Championship.

“It was in Reno, Nevada, and I was actually the only one on my team who was able to go out there,” said McCormack. “I flew out, and when we got there it was snowing. They said it was one of the worst snowstorms they’d ever had. Seventeen inches of snow fell in the day I was there.

“It was definitely difficult for a Georgia boy, going out there and running in 17 inches of snow. But I just felt like that if I was going all the way out there, that I might as well not waste the trip. I guess I just took advantage of the opportunity.”

McCormack placed 13th in the Foot Locker Southeast Regional, and just missed the cut which would have sent him to the Foot Locker Nationals and a chance to compete for the most prestigious of the national championship races. Ultimately, it was McCormack’s performance in that regional race that caught the eye of Tiger distance coach Brad Herbster.

“The thing that really got us excited about Ty, was the Foot Locker race when he was 90th going into the final mile, and came out like at 13th,” said Herbster. “So he really picked it up over the last mile. I told Coach (Lawrence) Johnson, ‘man, to do that on that course, was pretty impressive.’ Plus, Ty added the remark that, ‘hey, I wish that had been an 8K and not just a 5K. I just felt good.’

“You don’t hear that a lot from high school kids. They’ll say, ‘whew, that 5K was tough - that‘s all I’ve got.’ So, at times, Ty really looks forward to the longer races. No one really knows about him yet, but he’s a guy who can make a run at being All-Region and All-ACC.”