SE: K-State Freshman Nina Schultz Capping Historic Season at NCAA Championship
Mar 10, 2017 | Track & Field
Regardless of how Nina Schultz performs on Friday in the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championship, she will have already accomplished a historic feat at K-State. Then again, creating history is nothing new to her family.
Schultz’s grandmother, Zheng Fengrong, set the world high jump record in 1957 with a leap of 1.77m/5-09.75. Her grandfather, Duan Qiyan, was a 1959 Chinese junior champion in the high jump and a renowned coach in the event for many years afterward. Even her mother, Debra Duan, who moved from China to Canada in the 1990s, competed in the high jump.
“I guess it kind of runs in the family,” Schultz said of the event.
The bar, so to speak, was set at an early age for Schultz. She began competing in track and field at eight years old. Before long, she was jumping over string tied between two trees and landing on couch cushions for practice at her home in New Westminster, Canada, a suburb of Vancouver.
Ten years later, Schultz has more than made a name for herself in track and field. The high jump is only the tip of her iceberg of talent, too.
Schultz, a freshman at K-State, will compete in the pentathlon at the NCAA Championship on Friday in College Station, Texas. She is one of five Wildcats who qualified to the national meet, joining Christoff Bryan (high jump), Janee’ Kassanavoid (weight throw), Shardia Lawrence (triple jump) and Kim Williamson (high jump).
With her qualification, Schultz will become the first K-State freshman to compete in the pentathlon at the NCAA Championship. As long as she finishes, Schultz will be guaranteed All-American status, making her season even more extraordinary.
Since 2000, only two K-State female student-athletes have earned All-American honors as freshmen. Alyx Treasure, a Canadian high jumper who competed in last year’s Olympics, finished 15th at the NCAA Championship in 2012. In 2000, eventual three-time indoor All-American Amy Mortimer finished second in the 3,000-meter run.
“For any freshman to qualify is pretty special,” K-State Director of Track and Field and Cross Country Cliff Rovelto said.
Even more, Schultz, who turned 18 last November, is the youngest of all of the female competitors going to the NCAA Championship.
“It’s kind of cool thinking that I’m going to be part of history at K-State,” Schultz, one of two freshmen in Friday’s pentathlon field, said. “The main objective is just to go in and enjoy myself because I think that’s when I perform my best, just having fun and staying focused.”
Schultz enters the competition with the sixth-best point total of 4,271 points, which broke her own Canadian Junior record and moved her to third on K-State’s all-time list.
In her three pentathlon competitions this season, Schultz won each time and improved her previous point total by at least 168 points. She boosted her personal best score by 229 points in her latest performance.
“I think it really showed the potential that I have,” Schultz said of the performance, which earned her Big 12 Athlete of the Week accolades, an honor only 11 other K-State females have earned in the Big 12 era. “I think it really surprised myself and maybe even Coach (Rovelto) a little bit. He was pretty surprised with my results. There’s a lot of room for improvement still, so we’ll see what I can do at nationals.”
Schultz did not compete in the Big 12 Championship pentathlon, which she ranked first in among conference competitors. Instead, Schultz participated in three individual events and ran the Wildcats’ third leg of the 4x400-meter relay.
In her first conference meet, Schultz finished third in the high jump and fifth in both the 60-meter hurdles and long jump to amass a team-best 14 individual points. K-State’s 4x400 team also placed sixth, adding a fourth medal and three more points to Schultz’s weekend.
“Nina has improved significantly in every event. She has even surpassed her outdoor marks,” Rovelto said. “She has done a wonderful job of adapting to new training and higher work loads. She has also competed at a high level, as evidenced by her scoring in four events at the Big 12 Indoor Championships.”
Schultz is the only Wildcat to currently rank in K-State’s top-10 list for all five of the pentathlon’s events. This includes holding the third-best 60-meter hurdles time (8.44) and the fifth-best long jump mark (5.99m/19-08).
“I thought maybe my results wouldn’t excel so much because I’m just adjusting to everything new here,” Schultz said, “but it’s totally been different.”
Schultz points to a few factors that helped spur her improvement.
First and foremost has been the guidance she’s received from Rovelto, who she said “sold me on everything” about K-State in the recruiting phase. Her progress so far has only verified her decision to become a Wildcat.
“I’ve basically improved on everything so far,” she said. “Coach Rovelto… I still don’t know how he does it. He just makes everything work.
“A lot of the time, he makes predictions of what I can do and he tells me these unbelievable results that I didn’t think I could achieve, but then I went ahead and did them. I didn’t believe I could do them until he told me so. He’s just kind of magic.”
She also lauded the program’s culture, where there are many international student-athletes and a handful of Olympians often around practice.
“It’s really cool. Even the other day when I was having a really tough 800-meter practice, Akela Jones was there. She was there to help me out, help me through the whole process,” Schultz said of Jones, who won two national titles while at K-State and participated in the Olympics last year. “It’s really nice having them around because it kind of humanizes them, seeing how a normal person can become so successful. It kind of opens up the possibility of thinking that I can maybe achieve those goals eventually, too, of going to the Olympics.”
The Olympics are a long-term goal for Schultz, who said it’s a core part of her daily drive. Her grandmother and former world record holder was unable to participate in the Olympics because China boycotted it from 1952-84.
“I just hope that one day I can go and follow in her footsteps,” said Schultz, who talks to her grandmother often and still sends videos of her competing.
In the meantime, Schultz said she’s working on “trusting the process” at K-State, which had seven former and current athletes compete at the Olympics last year. She also has been trying to become mentally stronger, specifically focusing on not allowing an off performance in one event affect the next one.
“I’ve been talking to our sports psychologist, Ian (Connole), a lot,” she said. “He’s helped me out with a lot of things.”
These discussions have helped shape her approach for Friday’s pentathlon, where she hopes to finish in the top five and surpass 4,300 points — a feat only four-time Olympian Austra Skujyte and Jones have done at K-State in any meet.
While Schultz believes she can reach both of these goals, she is more focused on reveling in the experience. After all, she’s already made history.
“I think the best thing I can do for myself is just to go in, have fun and not put pressure on trying to place too well because I think that’s a mistake that I’ve made before at past competitions — thinking that I need to go in and do well — but if I just stay relaxed and focused, I think I’ll be fine,” she said. “I hope to go and just enjoy myself with my teammates.”
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