They never said congratulations

I’m going to start with some background on what led to my only individual track Sectional title. Basically my entire freshman year of high school, I was injured. I had back to back stress fractures. I got the first one in my left foot right before Sectionals for cross and the second one in my right foot right before my first track meet, both fractures in my second metatarsals. 

So, coming around to the start of my sophomore year, I had only ran a couple months within the past year. Needless to say, I was not in shape. It took all the way until the beginning of October, which was Sectionals, for me to be considered “in shape”. I ended up second at Sectionals behind one of my teammates. The following week was Regionals. At Regionals, my goal was top three. Coming around our second and final lap, going into the woods part of the course, I pass my teammate that had won Sectionals. She proceeds to then cut me off in the woods. Of course, no one is around to see this and I thought maybe it was just an accident. However, it was not. She did it again the next week at Semi-State. I ended up beating her in both of those races as well as at State. Every time I beat her, she got all upset and made a big fuss about it, and my coaches would always go to comfort her. To this day, I still do not understand those two situations. However, this was not even the worst part of the “drama”. 

Now, let’s fast forward a year and a half to outdoor track Sectionals of my junior year, which was her senior year. She had won the 800 at Sectionals her freshman through junior year. She was a good runner, obviously, but she has been having slight injury issues her senior track season. I had already ran the 4x800 and the 1600 that day. I was simply in the 800 to score points. This was her first, and I believe only, event of the day.

The gun goes off. I stay right on her. At the 300 mark, I start to drop off because I’m slightly fatigued from the other two races and I know I have the distance on the girls behind us. Coming around to 200 to go, I’m about 25 meters behind her. Then, my teammates and teammates from my rival school come up to the 200, inside the track, and say to me “You can get her!” and “Go get her!” To myself, I said, “Might as well try.” I started to kick pretty hard. I go to pass my coach with 100 to go and he actually tells me to slow down. Hard to believe, right? I didn’t listen. For some reason, she was almost in lane two, so I took the opportunity to go inside. With around 10 meters to go, we were neck and neck and it seemed like we had crossed at the same time, and honestly, I thought she had gotten me. She’s smiling and tells me “Good job”, thinking she’s won, because she hardly said those words when I did beat her. I go over to the bench to take off my spikes when our pole volt coach comes over to me congratulating me. I look at her with a confused look, telling her I don’t know what she’s talking about. Then some of my other teammates come over and hug me, saying things like “You beat her!” “Someone finally dethroned her!” “I cant believe you beat her!” 

It was just a few short minutes later when the final result was posted online and I saw that I had beaten the three-time Sectional champion in the 800 by 0.003. I was thrilled! However, she wasn’t and apparently neither were my distance and head coaches. One of my best friends on the team came over and said she heard her crying and saying how pathetic it was that she had lost to me. That hurt, I’ll admit it. I waited a few minutes for my coaches to come over to me after coddling her, but they never did. They went back to working the meet since we were hosting it. I even waited until I saw them after the meet, expecting that they would do it then, but they never said congratulations.

Senior Year and Now: You would have thought that after she graduated, things would be fine, but they weren’t. She always had special workouts and whenever I asked for something more intense or different than the rest of the team, I was always told that I needed to do what everyone else did. My father, who was more so my coach than my actual high school coach, finally fought to get more quality workouts for cross. It did help a little, but I know that I never did hit my full potential. This lead to worse issues for track my senior year. The football coaches became the new head coaches and our new distance coach was a former assistant cross coach. Our head coach said if I ever needed any individualized workouts, just talk to him because I was on a completely different level than everyone else at that point. After a minor injury, that was the case. I was immediately shut down by my distance coach and then the head coach. Both my younger sister and I walked away from the team because it was not worth a mediocre senior track season. My sister and I got blammed for the lack of success the team had. It was rather sad that they relied on us so much. 

Now, I’m running at a D1 college for my favorite coach. He actually coached my rival boys team to a Top 5 finish at State in cross before coming here. In high school, I had always wanted to run under him because of how he changed that program. Little did I know then.

- Anonymous