by RBR Admin
Diary of a First-Time Reporter at NCAA Nationals, Part II
by Orrin Konheim
The second day of the meeting promised significantly more action in a compressed period. At least, that was supposed to be the plan. Friday’s events would have been nine hours if you wanted to see the Moll sisters win the pole vault through the epic DMR battle between the two fastest milers in NCAA’s history at anchor. In contrast, the second day was supposed to be seven and a half hours, but most media didn’t start trickling until 2 to 3 when the first medals were awarded in the field events.
But nothing is certain in track and field. The USC Trojans entered the 4 X 400-meter relay with a two-point lead over Auburn and a four-point lead over Arkansas. The Trojans finished in fourth, and because this was enough difference to affect the score total, the Razorbacks filed a protest when their baton was dropped over alleged contact. This took approximately an hour, and most of the crowd cleared out except people with Texas Tech, Georgia, Mississippi State, and USC gear who had an affected team in the 4 X 4 field.
I caught the BYU men’s distance squad in the stands. I asked why they were still there, and they said they were there to support the 4 X 4 team. I mentioned that the oceanfront and beach aren’t too far away, and one confessed that they were stuck at the facility until the team bus could get them out.
Yesterday, I mentioned how the mixed zone allows you to interview athletes, but it doesn’t give you the best view of the race, the timer, or the scoreboard, and the speaker sounds garbled.
I discovered the magic of the trackside after watching from the upstairs press section, the mixed zone, and the backside. Again, this was a rookie mistake. For better or worse, the entire Virginia Beach Sports Center is geared toward the people sitting close to the finish line. This facility will be hosting Adidas Track Nationals next week, so they must be trusted to deliver quality track meets, but I’m just saying.
I also didn’t expect to see just how focused Georgia’s Aliyah Butler, Washington’s Nathan Green, or Mississippi State’s Abdullahi Hassan were before the gun went off. This was pretty incredible.
I caught myself saying, “Let’s go for an honest race, guys! Sub 4!” before the race. After all, who likes those races where they jog all but the final laps? It looked like Nathan Green had given me a look of irritation, and I regretted it instantly. When he was upset by Georgetown’s Abel Teffra, I felt horrible. I reached out to him in the mixed zone to apologize, and he told me not to worry. He wouldn’t be qualified if he listened to everyone in the stands.
The best interview in that set was Boston University’s Foster Malleck, who got third. The Stride Report’s Will Loggia interviewed him, who happened to be his roommate. The excitement between the two was palpable. In the mixed zone, multiple people might interview an athlete simultaneously, which can be heard on someone else’s video if I ask a question.
Malleck will represent Canada next week at the IAAF World Athletics Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China. Surprise Oregon mile champ Wilma Nielsen will also be competing for Canada, and they will both be flying out in the next day or two on economy red-eye flights. I can’t imagine how anyone could compete under such circumstances.
Speaking of Nielsen, I met her about an hour before her race when I asked which Oregon runners were competing. When she won the event, I asked her in the mixed zone if it was discouraging that I didn’t know who she was an hour ago. Her clever retort, “Now you will know,” will make me remember her name.
It was a day of upsets all over the board. North Carolina’s Makayla Paige was pushed in the first turn of the 800 and managed incredible balance to stay on her feet. She led pretty much wire-to-wire (in the backstretch of the final lap, she was briefly a couple steps in second). She took out some heavy hitters in LSU’s Michaela Rose, Stanford’s Rosin Willis, and the Harvard duo of Victoria Bossong and Sophia Gorriaran. Georgetown’s Abel Teffra broke the Washington Huskies’ five-time winning streak in the event, with Nathan Green in second and Ronan McMahon-Staggs in sixth. Matthew Erickson of Oregon finally affirmed Jerry Schumacher’s efforts in the men’s program with a win in the 800. Celli McCabe might have been the most impressive upset of the day, considering how dominant Alabama’s Doris Lemngole and many others are in the sport.
Her coach, Sean Cleary, said that she’s been to 11 national championships to date and finished as an All-American ten times, so it seemed like she might pick one up sooner or later.
Of the individual wins, an upset does a much better job riling up the in-stand fans. Abel Teffra and Makayla Paige had a massive gaggle of teammates running toward the starting line in disbelief and joy. Then again, the Tar Heel fans were shouting pretty loudly for Ethan Strand at the podium, so this is a spirited fan base, no matter how you split it. Sadly, the heptathletes might have gotten the least cheers by my ears. It’s challenging to follow a race where the placings in the 1000 don’t equate to where they stand on the podium. I’m unsure if it’s possible to lay out the complex math on a scoreboard, but the announcers could do a better job of laying the stakes out.
If there’s an award for the loudest cheering section, it would have to be Arkansas Isabella Whitaker in the 400, who set a new collegiate record at 49.24 seconds. The cheers at the finish line for Whitaker were audible nearly everywhere in the building. Whitaker is a local athlete from Prince George’s County, Maryland, so she had many people driving in for the meet. Still, she was one of five Olympians in the field, so her win wasn’t assured. She also went in the first two heats and had to bite her teeth for a few minutes while waiting to see if her record would hold up.
At the end of the day, I bumped into Yaseen Abdallah. Because of his YouTube channel, he was probably the person I would have felt more star-struck meeting on the first day. By now, I had calmed down from my deer-in-the-headlights phase. I thought I’d just say hi since he was close to me. He seemed down and not in the mood to talk. This was a year in which he astounded the pundits by finishing 4th at NCAAs and logging in the 3rd fastest 3K in NCAA history. This weekend, he finished out of the All-American ranks.
I didn’t want to be a reporter and ask him what went wrong. I just wanted to tell him I hoped he wasn’t too down on himself. It might have been naïve to say this, but they couldn’t take his times or NCAA finish away. Besides, I had a great experience being in person at this track meet. For the rest, isn’t something to be said about making the sport more accessible through a fun YouTube channel?
Random Notes:
-It’s interesting to see all the different classes of credentialed people. There are volunteers from all walks of life helping keep things smooth, as well as NCAA staff, media members, and even media from each individual team, who will serve to highlight the athletes for their school materials. There are also entire coaching contingents and medical staff, and it’s hard not to wonder if the programs are overdoing these compliments. I talked to at least a couple sprinting or distance coaches who didn’t necessarily qualify athletes from their sub-groups of the team.
-The inside scoop on the complimentary meals for people working the event: The coaches, media, and team media get one set of box lunches. Meanwhile, the volunteers (deservedly) get vouchers at the cafeteria. The winners here are the NCAA staff who eat like kings. It looked like a gourmet meal in there.
-The power of good photography can’t be underestimated. Taking a good picture of a sprinter in a closing barrage of milers is challenging. I met a couple of freelance photographers on-site and some local outlets. A local high school runner, Sam Levin, was having the time of his life as a freelance photographer. “It’s amazing. I’ve been watching track since I was 8, and I know all these teams. My whole family went to [Virginia] Tech, so being able to shoot for Tech and have them contact me is great.”
-A lot of the media teams are in twos and threes. Watching two of LetsRun’s staff writers divide and conquer the day’s events in real-time for their write-ups was a special treat.
Final updates from NCAA Div 1 Indoor Athletics: https://www.ncaa.com/live-updates/trackfield-indoor-women/d1/live-updates-2025-di-mens-and-womens-indoor-track-and-field-championships
