By David Melly
March 19, 2025
Good morning, trackheads! How did you do in your NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championship bracket? Did you win your office pool? Did you name your team something so clever it's borderline inscrutable, like the Johnny Brackets or the Riley CHAMPberlains?
In a perfect world, basketball wouldn’t be the only sport to take the country by storm each March. But we’re a ways off from indoor track catching up in the public consciousness, which is a shame—because once again, NCAA weekend delivered one of the most exciting meets of the year.
This meet had all the same hallmarks of March Madness (the basketball version), with all the drama centered around a 200-meter oval in Virginia Beach over the course of a single long weekend.
Surprising eliminations: The first day of competition didn’t feature many unexpected outcomes on the men’s side, but the women’s prelims were topsy-turvy from the start. NCAA 60m leader Tima Godbless of LSU didn’t get a chance to finish out her season on a high note, as a fairly blatant false start knocked her out of the running before she could get all the way down the straightaway. In the 400m, Olympic relay champion Kaylyn Brown of Arkansas, who entered as the #3 seed, finished runner-up in her heat but missed the final by two-tenths of a second. But perhaps the craziest event was the 800m, where Olympian and reigning NCAA champ Juliette Whittaker, and Arkansas’s Sanu Jallow, the fourth fastest collegian in history, both ended up on the wrong side of the Q.
All in all, it was a pretty rough Day 1 for the Razorback women in their attempt to defend their team title. They would ultimately finish in a three-way tie for fourth, 25 points behind the eventual champions from Oregon.
Rivalry narratives: Perhaps the most thrilling events of the weekend were the duels between the UNC’s Ethan Strand and UVA’s Gary Martin. The two fastest milers in NCAA history both opted out of the open mile to match up twice in other events: on the anchor of the distance medley relay and in Saturday’s 3000m final. At ACCs, Strand got the better of Martin in a quick 5000m final, but Martin came back two days later to pick up his own title in a Strandless 3000m. Despite their strong resumes, neither runner had won a NCAA title heading into the weekend, and Strand, with a lethal finishing kick and two collegiate records, was probably the slight favorite.
In the DMR, Strand made the first move, hitting the front of a six-man pack with 400 meters remaining. When the final lap came, however, Martin found a gear that we haven’t really seen before from the 20-year-old. With 100 meters to go, it was Gary the Great powering away from Strand to his first title. But there was plenty to celebrate for the Tar Heels the next day, when the script flipped and Strand decisively outkicked Martin over the final lap of the 3000m, winning a NCAA title of his own. The back-and-forth between the two rising stars has been one of the more fun recent rivalries to follow on the collegiate level, but it’s all in good fun, as this sweet moment between Strand, Martin, and 5000m winner Brian Musau shows.
New superstars: Before this weekend, Femke Bol probably didn’t know the name Isabella Whittaker. But after Whittaker gave her indoor world record a real scare in the 400m final, we reckon Bol might have spent a few minutes this weekend familiarizing herself with Whittaker’s game. It’s not that Juliette’s older sister was a total unknown before last weekend: the University of Pennsylvania graduate finished sixth in last year’s Olympic Trials and represented Team USA in the relay pool. But the 23-year-old grad transfer to Arkansas had never broken 50 seconds before this month, when she ran 49.90 to finish runner-up behind fellow Olympian Aaliyah Butler at SECs.
In a weird quirk of the two-section final system of indoor NCAAs, Whittaker and Butler got their rematch—in the first round of racing, where they both advanced to the final with identical marks of 51.61. Then they got split up for the final, where Whittaker threw down a gotta-see-it-to-believe-it run for the record books in the first heat, breaking the collegiate and American indoor records with an incredible 49.24 performance, just 0.07 seconds off Bol’s indoor best. In less than a minute of racing, Whittaker immediately ascended from someone to watch to the one to watch in one of the most stacked events in American sprints.
Favorites get upset: In last week’s preview, two of the heavy favorites we highlighted were JaMeesia Ford in the 200m and Johnny Brackins in the 60m hurdles… and we may have to apologize for creating a Lap Count Jinx after the dust settled on the sprints last weekend. Ford fell to TCU freshman Indya Mayberry, the Big 12 champ who’s now also an NCAA champ and the fourth fastest woman all-time indoors in the event, thanks to her 22.30 run in the final. Brackins may have been worn out by the double-duty he pulled on Day 1, competing in both the long jump and the 60H prelims, and he took his first collegiate loss of the season at an inopportune time, finishing fourth in the final in 7.54.
Brackins deserves great credit for being a team player, however, scoring in both events and contributing to USC’s 39-point team title. Which brings us to the weekend’s controversial conclusion…
Team drama: Whereas the theatrics in the women’s team title race were mostly contained to Day 1, the men’s competition, as it so often does, was not sorted out until the final event. The Trojans entered the 4x400m with a two-point lead over Auburn, who didn’t field a team, and four points up on defending team champs Arkansas. To come out victorious, Arkansas needed to perform extraordinarily well and USC needed to falter, and almost the exact opposite happened.
Disaster struck in the first lap, when an early cut-in from Auhmad Robinson of Texas A&M bumped Arkansas onto the infield and out of contention. Despite a bit more confusion during the handoffs (including a strange incident where the officials erroneously held up the anchor legs from getting on the track for the final exchange), USC safely picked up a heat win and fourth place overall finish, but Arkansas was relegated to jogging in a last-place finish.
Herein lies the problem: Arkansas rightfully could—and did—petition to get A&M disqualified from the results, but doing so only moved the Razorbacks up to 11th place and didn’t change their team score at all. The Arkansas coaches then tried, unsuccessfully, to either re-run the race solo or get the entire race re-run to give the team a shot at the points they missed. In the end, their efforts fell on deaf officiating ears, and USC got to hoist the team trophy—their first in 53 years.
Did Arkansas get screwed over? Undoubtedly. Would re-running the race be the best possible outcome for the integrity of the sport? Hard to say. Ultimately, part of the unique nature of indoor track compared with its outdoor cousin is the bumping and jostling that the tight turns engender. For better or worse, it’s part of the sport.
It was a frustrating conclusion for the Razorbacks and a small rain cloud over an otherwise extremely well-run meet. But hey, the randomness and unpredictability of championship season is what March Madness is all about.
David Melly
David began contributing to CITIUS in 2018, and quickly cemented himself as an integral part of the team thanks to his quick wit, hot takes, undying love for the sport and willingness to get yelled at online.
