FOR a man who reckons that cross country running is not that important, Brother Colm O'Connell is likely to cause apoplexy among fellow coaches savouring the prospect of having the odd athlete or two racing in the World Cross Country Championships in Torino tomorrow.

Brother Colm has eight. "Of course, I'm very proud and happy for them, but we really don't prepare for this event, it's just part of the lead up to the summer track season.

We are in Iten, in western Kenya, at St Patrick's High School, one of the country's leading secondary establishments, where the Patrician brother from Mallow, Co Cork, first came to teach 21 years ago. He knew nothing about athletics back then.

It was 1976, the year Eamonn Coghlan broke Irish hearts by finishing fourth - "the loneliest place in athletics", as he once characterised it - in the Olympic 1,500 metres in Montreal.

At those same Games, Britain's Brendan Foster went one better and won a bronze medal in the 10,000 metres.

Foster's younger brother, Peter, was doing VSO work at St Patrick's. "I think it was pretty well the first day I was there," Brother Colm recalls. "Peter came to my door and said, `Come and help me with coaching the kids'. A year later, when he left, he just brought a tracksuit and a stopwatch to me, and said, `There you are. Get on with it'. So I did.

Twenty years later we sit chatting in the middle of St Patrick's, in the square of garden planted with trees, bushes and placards with hand painted dedications by Brother Colm stuck in the rich soil in front of them. We visit each one in turn, with commentary by the painter, a short, stout man with wispy hair concealed by the archetypal coach's cap.

"Charles and Kip Cheruyiot, world junior record breakers in the 1,500 and 5,000 metres, 1983, my first successes. Peter Rono, Olympic 1,500 metres champion 1988, my big breakthrough. Jonah Birir, 1992 Olympic Steeplechase champion. And the latest, Wilson Kipketer, 1995 world 800 metres champion. Of course, I've got to add something to that, after he broke the world indoor record in Paris last week."

There is no braggadocio in this litany, only pride. And he quickly relates how he sent Paul Ereng away. "I told him he wouldn't get on our school 4 x 400 metres relay team. Two years later he won the Olympic 800 metres."

But he could also have added a lot more names, such as Moses Kiptanui, Daniel Komen, Ismail Kirui, all world champions and/or world record holders. And many, many more he has coached. Young women, too, such as Lydia Cheromei, world junior cross country champion, aged 15 in 1991, or Rose Cheruyiot and Susan Sirma.

St Patrick's is a boys' school, and a pretty exclusive one at that. So, to accommodate all the others who came to him for coaching, he arranged to work instead at a nearby teachers training college, although his house is still at St Patrick's, as are the quarters for some of the youngsters, who now come from all over Kenya, and indeed, the world.

There were two teenage boys from Norway there earlier this week, and Anne Marie Sandell, the Finn who won the world junior cross country title in 1995, was there for six months beforehand. Young Americans have also been there, although God knows what they think of the Spartan conditions. A downmarket summer camp, maybe? He just smiles and shrugs: "Life is hard in Kenya. That's what helps make these kids so good."

In fact, he's what helps makes these kids so good. His life has changed because of it. When I visited two years ago, he told me how, even at the seminary, he couldn't wait to get out of class to go to play football. "So I know how the kids feel."

The symbiosis is completed by his extraordinary attitude to coaching. At the track this week - he had rearranged a day's teaching, and got a dozen kids off class to accommodate a television crew - I was surprised to hear him ask the kids what they wanted to do in this first real track session of the season.

"I learned how to coach by listening to the kids, them telling me how they felt. Now I just give them the outline, tell them what I learned from their predecessors, the rest is up to them."

This is real teaching. Not just helping them to run well, but how to take charge of their lives. You can't get much better than that. And you can't get much better than the two young men just out of their he points out at the track, Japhet Kimutai and Kipkurui Misoi. They won gold and silver respectively in the 800m and steeplechase at the World Junior Championships in Sydney last summer. "Mark their names for when they go back to Sydney in the year 2000. They'll be close to winning Olympic gold then."

The youngsters he coaches who will be close to gold in Torino are already seven hours' drive away in the Central Highlands, at St Mark's Training College in Kigari, on the slopes of Mount Kenya. They have gone there as part of the elite squad, selected for a month's intensive training following the national championships in February.

The atmosphere is a little more charged with anticipation for the task ahead, one that will undoubtedly be a winning task, as it has been for all four Kenyan teams - senior and junior men and women - for the last two years.

We have visited there first, and when we left, several of the runners and the women's coach, who comes from Iten, called out "Regards to Brother Colm".

Back in Iten, where the brother, dare we say it, found his true vocation, the coach smiles again, and settles into a chair in the shade, surrounded by his charges. They attack a crate of soda water, the athletes' thirst worked up by a hard session, the coach's by the fact that, "there was a little celebration last night, for St Patrick's Day. Nothing like Ireland, mind. But my heart belongs to Kenya now.