BYU — the premier distance-running school in the country — is sending 15 athletes to this week’s NCAA indoor track championships, and one of them is — what’s this? — a sprinter? Her name is Sami Oblad, a senior from tiny Stansbury Park, Utah, who has come out of nowhere in the last nine months to become a national-class 400-meter sprinter at Distance U.
According to BYU records, it marks only the third time in 27 years that a BYU athlete has qualified for an individual sprint race in the NCAA indoor championships, and the first since 2010.
Improvements in the sprints are made incrementally, by tenths or hundredths of a second, yet in less than a year she has dropped her best time by about 1½ seconds. After battling serious knee injuries and dabbling with the high jump, hurdles and heptathlon for two years, she made a major breakthrough in May 2024, lowering her best time from 53.06 to 52.35 in the NCAA West Regionals, her final race of the season.
That broke a 25-year school record. Then a month ago she clocked a time of 51.71 in Albuquerque, making her the fourth-fastest collegian in the nation at the time. Two weeks later, she posted a time of 51.70 to finish third at the Big 12 championships in Lubbock, Texas.
Ask her if she is surprised, Oblad almost apologizes when she says no.
“It sounds cocky to say it, but it’s the reason I’ve been pushing so hard the last two years. I felt like this is where I belonged. I love to train and I put my heart into it. I had an intuitive feeling that I had more in me and that I hadn’t given it all yet.”
— BYU sprinter Sami Oblad
“It sounds cocky to say it, but it’s the reason I’ve been pushing so hard the last two years. I felt like this is where I belonged. I love to train and I put my heart into it. I had an intuitive feeling that I had more in me and that I hadn’t given it all yet.”
Ask BYU sprint coach Kyle Grossarth about all this, he says, “At (the 2024) regionals she exploded and ran low 52. Ever since then she’s been on this trajectory … To go from low 53 to 51 — you don’t see jumps like that once you get to a certain level.”
Oblad’s next challenge will be the NCAA indoor championships, which will be held Friday and Saturday in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The level of competition among U.S. collegians in that event has soared. Only six years ago, there was only one woman who ran faster than Oblad’s 51.70, and barely at that.
Oblad has the 11th-fastest time this year (for the record, the NCAA does silly conversions now for altitude and therefore downgraded her 51.70 to 51.82 even though Lubbock is merely 3,000 feet above sea level; this is not what the sports needs — more esoteric stats).
“I knew she would improve, but she has exceeded my expectations,” says Grossarth.”To see her development at this point is absolutely remarkable.”
Looking back on Oblad’s career, Grossarth notes, “She’s been on a bit of a journey.”
At Stansbury High, she was an all-state volleyball player with Olympic aspirations in that sport. She was encouraged to try track and field — and specifically the high jump — because of the jumping ability she showed on the court. Eventually she tried the 100, then the 200 and finally the 400. She won the 200, 400 and high jump at the 2017 state championships as a junior.
Oblad tore her ACL and meniscus during her senior volleyball season and wasn’t able to defend her state championships.
BYU recruited her as a heptathlete (the women’s version of the decathlon). What was clear by then is that Oblad is simply a superior athlete who could excel in several events — 800 meters, 400 meters, 200 meters, high jump, hurdles, heptathlon. In high school, she cleared 5 feet and 9 ¾ inches — this from a woman who is not quite 5-foot-6. “You don’t see many girls jumping over their heads,” says Grossarth.
There was all that athleticism, but the challenge was finding an event that her body could survive without breaking down.
She wasn’t fully recovered from her high school knee injury when she reported to BYU, and then she tore her meniscus again during fall training and redshirted the season. She left school to serve a mission, and when she returned she trained for the high jump and the heptathlon, but her body broke down again, this time with stress fractures.
For a time, she trained to be a 400 hurdler, but she couldn’t get past her own doubts that her twice-injured knee could withstand the stress of flying over hurdles. “At that point, I said let’s not mess with it,” recalls Grossarth. “We focused on sprints.”
She began training with Grossarth and his sprint group at the outset of the 2022-23 season and produced modest times of 25.00 and 54.85 in the 200- and 400-meter dashes. Her moment of truth came at the NCAA outdoor championships. She was supposed to be an alternate for the 4x400-meter relay, but the day before the competition, she learned that she would compete as a substitute.
“As an alternate and not one of the top four girls, she felt like she was on the outside — not good enough,” says Grossarth. “It was emotionally rough for her. We had a very long, tearful evening the night before the race. That’s the one thing she struggled with: confidence.”
As Oblad tells it, “I didn’t feel like I should be at nationals. I had done nothing remarkable. I was a mess. Kyle walked me through it.”
She wound up running a low 53-second split — two seconds faster than her best time in the open event. “It was a big deal for me,” she says. “I thought, maybe I do belong.”
Afterward, she wanted to step up her training and asked Grossarth if he would train her as an 800 runner. “Kyle said, ‘We can do that.’ He was willing to personalize training for me.”
That summer she did road mileage, including tempo runs. She returned to BYU in the fall with “a totally different fitness. I leaned out. I lost 15 pounds.”
Says Grossarth, “She needs hard workouts. She thrives on that. She is a grinder. A lot of it she does on her own. No one else can handle the workload and the speed.”
Oblad ran a couple of 800-meter races indoors, including one in which she clocked a solid time of 2:09.34, but then her sprinting took off. She dropped her 200-meter time to 24.04 and her 400 to an indoor school record of 53.21. She took another quantum leap forward at the outset of the 2023-24 season, running 7.55 for 60 meters — tied for the ninth fastest in school history — and 23.72 in the 200 — third fastest in school history — besides the school record 51.70 for 400 meters, and ran a leg on BYU’s school-record 4x400 relay.
“I had to get her to understand that she was good,” says Grossarth. “She was not confident in her flat speed. She’s very explosive. She excelled at volleyball and high jump. They are relatable. I had to convince her. She embraced it this year. She said she wanted to run the 60 and she made our top-10 board.”
Oblad will conclude her track career at the end of the outdoor season even though she has some remaining eligibility. She is engaged to Eli Hazlett, who is BYU’s second-fastest 400-meter runner ever. “I’m excited to move on,” she says. “Track has consumed a lot of my life in college and high school.”
