Philo Germano has transformed from a walk-on to an All-American at Syracuse

In fall 2012, Albany High School head coach John Deer stood by the finish line of the New York Section II race in Saratoga. On both sides of him stood University at Albany SUNY cross-country coaches. Much of the last mile was hidden by trees. But the last 600 meters opened into a wide field. Deer watched and waited for his best runner, Philo Germano, to appear.

From the finish, the crowd barely made out one runner hustling down the hill. He was small but speedy.

Deer remembered UAlbany coach Roberto Vives saying, “Is that Philo? It’s Philo! It’s Philo!”

Albany had never had a champion before, and Deer said at the beginning of that year it wasn’t expected to have one. The now-senior All-American at Syracuse was never expected to be the accomplished runner that he is. A walk-on wasn’t expected to lift the Orange to its first national championship since 1951. Germano knew he could. On Saturday, Germano looks to help Syracuse win its second national championship in three years and third in total. This, all from a runner who wasn’t even supposed to be here to begin with.

***

Germano had always been a two-sport athlete: running and baseball. In the beginning, he ran cross-country to get in shape for baseball, but he had never been a great runner.

That changed during his junior year of high school. He became one of the best runners in Section II, and decided to drop baseball to focus on running. The following year, he validated his decision by winning the Section II Championship.

On that cold November day, Germano crossed the finish line first. While everyone else celebrated, Germano instantly looked toward the following weekend in Elma, New York where Syracuse would scout the state meet.

On that morning of Nov. 10, 2012, Germano eyed the SU logos from far away. Deer felt if Germano could finish in the top 10, he might draw attention from Syracuse assistant coaches Brien Bell and Adam Smith.

The gun fired. Germano chugged and crossed the finish line in 13th. His final time of 16:03.4 was six full seconds behind 10th place. Deer remembered looking over at his senior, eyes locked on Bell and Smith. They never approached him.

“I was mainly just disappointed about the race,” Germano said. “I had bigger goals.”

Despite the letdown, the race qualified Germano for regionals, where he then earned a spot at nationals.

Even though he wasn’t recruited to play at Syracuse, Germano walked onto the team his freshman year. When Bell and Smith didn’t approach him, he kept his head up and called Smith about joining the team.

“His (personal records) weren’t anything jaw-dropping,” Smith said. “(But he’s) the kind of guy we look for. A good, team guy that wants to work hard.”

Germano wasn’t prepared for what would happen.

***

Germano raced around the indoor track at Penn State in February 2014, quickly losing ground on the lead pack. Lap-by-lap, he dropped deeper. When the 5,000-meter race was over, Germano crossed the line in 13th out of 22 participants, last among all Syracuse runners. He was just a freshman walk-on who redshirted the cross-country season, but that didn’t wasn’t an excuse for him.

“I absolutely blew up,” Germano said.

Syracuse head coach Chris Fox and Bell pulled the freshman aside. It was his first race for Syracuse. But like himself, the coaches expected more out of him.

“He wasn’t Division I ready,” Germano’s father Phil said. “Not even close. What it took to work out and prepare for the program, he was not ready for that. But he had the will and desire.”

After that race, Germano’s mindset changed. He turned into a “sponge,” said then-Syracuse star Martin Hehir.

Gradually, Germano improved. He lagged behind less and less during workouts as he adjusted to the “professional” environment his coaches established. At the end of his true freshman year, Germano was still one of the slowest runners on the team, but he felt stronger, and that strength carried into the summer, until he hit another obstacle.

Germano spent that summer working as a lifeguard at Lincoln Park Pool. In between shifts, some of the lifeguards played soccer in a field next to the pool. Divots littered the field. On a hot summer day, Germano juked and ran to make a play on the ball. He kicked. His body went one way and his foot the other.

“I heard a pop,” Germano said. “I kept trying to run on it. I was like ‘this isn’t real. This isn’t happening. It’s still good right?’”

But it wasn’t. Germano damaged a ligament in his left foot. Just as he was beginning to gain steam as a runner, his redshirt freshman season ended as more of a rebuild from his injury. The first day he arrived on campus was his first day running that season, Germano said. Others had been training all summer, he couldn’t.

Germano spent a great deal of that redshirt freshman season unable to contribute, watching his teammates travel the country and run against the nation’s best.

“I’m already bottom of the pack,” he said. “And now I’m injured.”

It was another season of disappointment for Germano, struggling to grasp with another missed opportunity to show he belonged. Instead of racing, the injured Germano helplessly had to watch his team compete, his sister Sara said.

Once healed, he promised himself he would never feel helpless again.

***

Germano couldn’t believe it. Eighty-ninth at Wisconsin. He was furious. After battling back from injury the year before, he spent the summer in Syracuse training, and this race didn’t prove it.

“That’s not what I wanted to do if I wanted to secure a spot,” Germano said, “to even run at nationals.”

When the team arrived back in Syracuse, the first thing Germano did was shave his head. Rather than sport the flowing locks he had the entire year, he cut it all off.

“I wanted something to blame,” Germano said. “I thought short-hair Philo was going to be better than long-hair Philo.”

Everyone could see the change in appearance. He was more “hairodynamic,” a phrase Hehir coined. But Germano did something else that day, something no one else knew until after the season.

“He didn’t want to be the guy that kept Syracuse from winning a national championship,” Phil said. “He’d just say ‘I don’t want to be that guy that holds us back.’”

On the corner of his desk, sat a small post-it note. He wrote on the paper: “You are an All-American.”

And improbably, he transformed into one.

The ACC Championships took place in Tallahassee, Florida, just two weeks after Wisconsin. It was a hot morning at the end of October. Syracuse lined up in the pole position, Justyn Knight, Hehir and Colin Bennie up front, while Germano stood in the back of the remaining three SU runners. But he didn’t stay there.

The race opened quickly, with teams sprinting ahead to reach the front of the bottlenecked course. Right up front ran Knight, Hehir and Bennie along with veterans Joel Hubbard and Dan Lennon. In the mix with them was Germano.

“I’m looking at Fox like, ‘I almost feel like Philo’s too aggressive here,’” Smith said. “‘We’re going to want to tell him to hold up.’”

But Fox let him run, and Germano didn’t let them down. He finished fourth for SU and 15th overall, earning Syracuse points for the first time in his career.

The next week, Syracuse ran Sweet Road, as the team does before any important race. The instructions were simple: four-and-a-half mile tempo run, followed by a 90-second break and then one hard mile to finish it off.

Germano had never had a great Sweet Road workout before, and as the coaches put it, that six-mile road is where champions are made. When the runners began crossing the last marker, Knight, Bennie and Hehir came in one-two-three, followed by Germano just ahead of Hubbard.

“Fox and I were at the end of that mile like, ‘something’s happening here,” Smith said. “We knew he had something big in store.”

Prepping for the national championship the following week, Fox’s goal for Germano was to be around 75th, Fox said. But Germano had higher expectations.

The biggest test awaited at nationals. The race began like ACCs. The course thinned, and it was a race to the front to avoid getting caught in the back. Germano did just that, mixing in with his teammates toward the front. But as the race continued, he slipped. He took the first mile too fast and struggled to maintain his position.

He bobbed in the 50s range and remained there for a few miles. Then, with 2 kilometers left in the race, Germano picked up speed. Gradually, over the next kilometer, he moved up, passing Hubbard to cement himself as SU’s fourth man.

With about 800 meters left, runners reached the top of a hill before descending into an open straightaway. It looked like Saratoga three years earlier. When Germano hit the top of the hill, he saw Bell, who screamed, “We’re up by three points!”

“That’s just enough to make you go, first of all, ‘Oh my God we can do this,’” Germano said, “and second of all, ‘This is way too close.’”

Galloping down the hill, he picked out Colorado’s Ammar Moussa. Colorado entered the race looking for its third-straight national championship, and Moussa, the year before, finished in fifth. All he had to do was beat Moussa.

He zeroed in. An entire pack of runners remained between Germano and Moussa. One-by-one he picked off his competition, inching closer to that Colorado jersey.

Germano’s mother and sister, Sara, watched just feet from the finish line. They hadn’t expected Germano to be in the position he was in.

“You see this short kid with a beard,” Sara said, “and I’m like, ‘That can’t be Philo. He shouldn’t be here already.’ And I think I turned to my mother and I was like ‘Is that Philo? Why is he here already?’”

When she saw him that early, Sara thought that meant Colorado might have won.

But Sara didn’t know she was seeing the crucial part of the race that might decide that.  Germano was on a mission to track down Moussa. Step-by-step he inched closer, until just three steps before the line, he edged out the All-American.

“‘Yes! I got Ammar,’” Germano remembered thinking. “I really didn’t know where I was but I was like, ‘I got him.’”

In the final 2 kilometers, Germano soared from 53rd to 39th, making him an All-American. But more importantly, he dropped 14 points off Syracuse’s score.

In the tent afterwards, SU awaited the results. The scoreboard kept switching the leads and the positions. Finally it held for a few moments, and didn’t change.

Syracuse 82, Colorado 91.

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The tent went berserk. Sara raced in after the announcement to find her brother. She told him his finish. He couldn’t believe it.

The coaching staff wanted Germano around 75. Had he finished even in 53rd, SU loses. Those 14 points won Syracuse its first national championship in 64 years.

“He has always thought of himself as elite,” Fox said, “even if other people haven’t, including me. And he’s proven it every time.”

After the race, Germano called his father, who was watching from home. With tears rolling down his face and a shaky voice, he told Phil that he was an All-American.

“It was the happiest that Philo ever was in his life,” Phil said. “I’ll never forget that.”

***

Two years after that legendary kick, Germano has cemented his legacy yet he doesn’t feel done.

Germano wasn’t recruited to SU. He didn’t succeed when he first arrived. He faced injury and struggled to build himself from at one point being Fox’s slowest runner.

“Seeing what Philo’s done,” Hehir said, “should be a huge inspiration to other runners out there who don’t think they’re good enough.”

But much of that is because of the obstacles that he had to overcome to achieve his dream at his dream school. Anywhere else and none of it may have been possible.

“Twenty years from now, Philo will never say, ‘Gee dad, I wonder how good I could’ve been,” Phil said. “He knows. You can’t ask for anything more than that.”