By David Melly
February 26, 2025
With the first national championships of 2025 taking place around the world this past weekend in preparation for the World Indoor Championships next month in Nanjing, China, it was a big weekend for track and field.
Or was it?
Depending on which athletes you choose to follow as a track fan, you may have missed the memo entirely!
Nikki Hiltz stans had plenty to celebrate coming out of Staten Island, as Hiltz won the 3000m and 1500m to pickup their fifth and sixth national titles on the track. (In doing so, they extended their impressive indoor/outdoor U.S. title streak in the 1500m that now goes back to 2023 Indoors.)
But if you’re more of a Noah Lyles supporter, it may seem to you like the indoor season began and ended on the same weekend earlier this month. Katie Moon heads got to watch their fave soar to her seventh national title with a 4.80m victory in the pole vault, but the Ryantologists (Ryan Crouser fans, of course) have yet to emerge from their deep winter hibernation at all.
The Engaged But Uninformed American Distance Running Fan—a made-up guy who definitely doesn’t actually exist—might be thinking: wasn’t the big 5000m race last weekend when Grant Fisher set that record?... Or was it Friday, when Cole Hocker and Cooper Teare battled to the line at BU?... Or maybe nationals was that big meet at the Armory, given that was the last time any of these guys all raced head-to-head? This imaginary guy’s confusion is understandable.
So to clear things up for him, the 2025 U.S. Indoor Track and Field Championships took place this past weekend. And even though neither Noah nor Sha’Carri nor Sydney nor most of the other NBC poster children were in attendance, it was still a great meet. In a jam-packed window where the Olympics weren’t that long ago, Worlds (outdoors at least) is a long way off, and runners across short, medium, and long distances are trying to figure out how to cram Grand Slam Track and/or The TEN and/or a spring marathon into their schedule, U.S. Indoors clearly wasn’t a must-go. But the athletes who did show up made the most of the opportunity, and we got some interesting outcomes as a result.
When it comes to resume-building, no one made better use of their weekend than Hobbs Kessler. Since winning the inaugural Road Mile World Championships in the fall of 2023, Kessler has only gotten better, making his first U.S. team on the track, winning a bronze medal in the 1500m at last year’s World Indoors, qualifying for his first Olympics in not one, but two, events, and finishing fifth in a heavily-stacked Paris 1500m final in the first sub-3:30 performance of his career. But until Saturday, he had never won a national title over any distance or surface.
Sure, the two Americans who beat him most consistently—Hocker and Yared Nuguse—were not in attendance, but they don’t hand out prizes for hypothetical performances. And despite entering the competition as the heavy favorite in both the 1500m and 3000m, Kessler didn’t look like a guy bogged down by the weight of expectation. He had to work hard to get past Dylan Jacobs en route to his first win in the 3000m, closing in 27.19 to clock a 7:38.00 meet record, but in the 1500m, he both looked and acted like the top dog, leading almost gun-to-tape and making his 26.26 final 200m kick seem like a controlled cruise.
It’s hardly groundbreaking analysis to say that taking the most talented high schooler in the country, giving him four years of pro-level training, and adding tactical sharpening from international racing experience is a winning combination. But it’s clearly working out for the 21-year-old Kessler. And while Hobbs is planning to skip World Indoors, he otherwise got the most bang for his buck out of his decision to contest the double.
The absence of some of the other heavy hitters in the 1500m makes sorting out the two spots on Team USA somewhat complicated. Kessler was the only finisher with the automatic standard, and World Athletics intends to fill the 30 spots using a descending order list of best performances since September 2024. Right now, the first guy in line for the team would be Joe Waskom, who finished… uh… 11th. But should second-placer Sam Prakel, third-placer Luke Houser, or any of the other guys higher up on the list clock a 3:36ish 1500m between now and March 9th, when the window closes, they should fall within the qualifying window. So if anyone has an extra couch or five to crash on in Boston next weekend, there’s surely some high demand.
Such is the weird nature of a national championship that nominally carries equal weight with outdoors but the tippy-top athletes in particular don’t seem to take very seriously. It opens up the opportunity for many of the sport’s more unsung heroes to earn their Team USA kits, but it dilutes the competition itself. No event better encapsulated the challenge and opportunity represented by U.S. Indoors than the women’s triple jump, where only three entrants competed for two spots on Team USA. Hey, at least USATF saved $2,500 by not having to pay anyone fourth- or fifth-place prize money?
Some are more justified in treating U.S. Indoors as more of a “been there, done that” situation. Last year, Team USA took home six World Indoor titles in Glasgow, and if you’re someone like Bryce Hoppel, who now has two World Indoor medals and four U.S. Indoor titles but finished fourth in Paris last year, it’s understandable that you may want to structure your season to maximize your chances of capturing an outdoor medal. But then again, two of the athletes who have the best arguments to be bored of indoor USAs are Grant Holloway, who has never lost a senior 60m hurdles race and is nevertheless still going to shoot for a threepeat in Nanjing, and Vashti Cunningham, who has an incredible nine-year win streak in the high jump at U.S. Indoors and picked up her fourteenth overall national title this weekend.
For others, a long absence makes the heart grow fonder and the meet more appealing. Shelby Houlihan will be once again representing Team USA after finishing second in the 3000m at her first national championship in five years following her 2021 suspension for testing positive for a banned substance. Regardless of how you feel about that particular situation, it’s understandable that Houlihan had this meet circled on her calendar for a very long time. Her former Bowerman TC teammate Sinclaire Johnson will also be back on a U.S. team for the first time since 2022 after a few up-and-down years of injuries and near misses. Last year, she claimed the unenviable honor of fastest non-qualifier in history in the 1500m at the U.S. Trials, running 3:56.75 to become the sixth-fastest American ever in the event but only the fourth in that race, so it’s nice to see her get back in the red, white, and blue.
One of the unusual features of this World Championship technically being a reschedule of 2020’s is that the automatic byes are not the reigning 2024 champs but the winners of the 2019-2020 World Indoor Tour. Some of those folks are long since retired, but Ronnie Baker has gone the opposite direction, returning to the top of the podium in the 60-meter dash for the first time since 2017. He didn’t need to win in New York to get a spot on Team USA, but the fact that he did suggests that Baker isn’t heading to Nanjing merely to take a glorified victory lap sprint down the runway.
Similarly, 34-year-old Christina Clemons finished third in the 60m hurdles in a season-best 7.81 and has an auto-spot from 2020, so a podium sweep is not out of the realm of possibility given that she, Grace Stark, and fourth-placer Alia Armstrong are all in the top eight performers in the world this season. (U.S. champ and world leader Masai Russell is shutting down her indoor season to focus on her Grand Slam Track debut in a few weeks).
Ultimately, was the weekend a success or a failure for The Sport? It’s hard to say. The athletes themselves are, generally speaking, rational actors, so a star’s choice to skip one meet for another is almost always the result of that individual making a decision that makes the most sense for them, given the incentives, tradeoffs, and risks. As much as it’s fun to throw around allegations of “dodging” the competition, it’s more accurate to say that the personal and financial incentives simply don’t always add up the same way for different athletes. And races that don’t just feature the usual suspects matching up again and again tend to produce more interesting, unpredictable outcomes. Just ask 800m runner Valery Tobias, who’s not (yet) a household name on par with Athing Mu or Ajee’ Wilson but who managed to full-send her way to 1:59.55 PB and a spot on the World team with a bold early lead that only Nia Akins was able to catch in the end.
At the same time, who bears ultimate responsibility for making USAs a can’t-miss event? A resource-constrained national governing body? An overseas federation trying to get a few hundred different countries to all care about World Indoors? A streamer or media company trying to sell stories and bring eyeballs to races? Yes, yes, and yes—and there’s probably also a little shared responsibility on the athletes themselves to prioritize as many championships as possible. But it takes a village to make a meet compelling, and like so many other elements of track and field, U.S. Indoors is a work in progress.
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.
