Tiffany Lott-Hogan, the former Olympian, member of the Utah Sports Hall of Fame, and current assistant coach on the BYU track and field team might want to consider telling heptathlete Zoey Bonds that she isn’t going to flourish at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships next week in Eugene, Oregon.
Why?
Because any time throughout her career that Bonds, a redshirt junior from Las Vegas, has been questioned, she confounds her doubters.
“Zoey is one of those athletes that if you tell her she can’t do something, she’s going to prove you wrong,” said Lott-Hogan, the three-time NCAA champion hired in 2023 to oversee BYU’s multi-events and jumps athletes. “So that’s a fun thing about her.”
Case in point: At an indoor meet last December, Bonds asked Lott-Hogan to predict what her time would be in the 60-meter hurdles, and the coach said it would be “not overall slow, but slow for her.”
“Part of my (thought process) is just ‘fake it until you make it.’ Be confident until you are confident. … You can’t be timid about anything in life.”
— BYU heptathlete Zoey Bonds
Naturally, Bonds went out and broke her personal record by a substantial margin and posted the third-best time in the indoor 60-meter hurdles (8.20) in BYU history.
Later, after she was told that she was more of an outdoor combined-event athlete than an indoor star, she was runner-up at the 2026 Big 12 championships in the indoor pentathlon (five events) and placed 10th at the 2026 NCAA Indoor Championships.
In an interview Tuesday with the Deseret News, Bonds said that dogged determination to surpass expectations was instilled in her by her parents when she was a youngster and trying to follow in the footsteps of three older sisters who were outstanding athletes: Tiana, Talie and Quincy Bonds. Tiana and Talie competed in track and field for Arizona, while Quincy played soccer for the Wildcats.
“Part of my (thought process) is just ‘fake it until you make it,’” she said. “Be confident until you are confident. … You can’t be timid about anything in life.”
Bonds’ mother, Natalie, briefly ran track at BYU, then turned her attention to producing track athletes and volleyball players. The irony is that Tiana and Talie went to college as heptathletes, then specialized in one event. Zoey went to BYU as primary a hurdler, then became the school’s best pentathlete and heptathlete in several years.
“I ended up being the only one who stuck with multi-events,” she said. “Maybe I’m the crazy one.”
Someone must have told her she couldn’t do it.
“Our parents have never let us settle in sports. They always would push us and would never let us take a backseat,” Zoey said. “We were always working extra hard after practices or before practices.”
That included some workouts with her mother in the middle of the school day when she was at Centennial High in Vegas, while everyone else was in their air-conditioned classrooms.
“Just watching my sisters accomplish the things that they did inspired me,” Zoey said. “It is kind of funny. I would say, ‘If they have the genetics to do it, then I do, too. I’m kinda proving that to be true.”
‘She’s a fighter’: Why BYU’s Bonds has a chance at nationals
Bonds is one of more than a dozen BYU athletes who will compete at Hayward Field on the Oregon campus in the competition that runs from next Wednesday to June 13, having qualified at the Big 12 meet as one of the top 24 athletes in the country in the heptathlon.
Heptathlon events are 100-meter hurdles (Bonds’ favorite and specialty), high jump, shot put, 200-meter dash, long jump, javelin throw and 800-meter run (Bonds’ least favorite event).
While stars such as distance runners Jane Hedengren, Carter Cutting and Taylor Lovell (steeplechase) are among the favorites in their respective events — freshman Hedengren will go for the double in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters — Bonds has her eye on earning All-America status in the heptathlon.
The top eight finishers are First Team All-Americans, the next eight are Second Team All-Americans, and everybody else gets honorable mention accolades.
Bonds went to Arkansas for the NCAA West Prelims last week hoping to qualify in the 100-meter hurdles in Eugene, but just missed after making it to the quarterfinals in that event.
“I would love to be a First Team All-American. I was able to be second team in indoor, so that is a goal of mine, to move up,” she said. “Honestly I just want to do the best I can on that day. With the heptathlon, there are so many variables. My goal is to just do the best I can and hopefully have some PRs.”
Bonds scored 5,735 points at the Big 12 meet, a personal best. Lott-Hogan said surpassing 5,800 points is a reasonable goal for her prized pupil at nationals.
“Honestly I just want to do the best I can on that day. With the heptathlon, there are so many variables. My goal is to just do the best I can and hopefully have some PRs.”
— BYU heptathlete Zoey Bonds on her goals at the NCAA outdoor championships
“It is not that she has to get PRs or personal bests, personal records in anything. It’s just being near the upper 1% of all of her marks, and she should put together a very strong meet,” Lott-Hogan said. “The NCAA (field of competitors) right now is just incredible in the combined events, so she has tough, tough competition to go against. But she’s a fighter.”
BYU’s Ben Barton, who Lott-Hogan also coaches, is among the favorites in the men’s multi-event competition, the decathlon, in Eugene.
“It is hard to say he can win it, because you never know what’s going to happen at nationals, but he has a very good chance of being top three,” Lott-Hogan said.
Bonds is the Cougars’ first national qualifier in the heptathlon since Hailey Folsom Walker made it in 2022 and placed eighth overall with 5,692 points. She has another year of eligibility remaining in indoor and plans to return to that next December, having gotten her degree in family life last month from BYU.
Whether she will make another run at outdoors next spring might depend on whether a proposed NCAA rule that allows athletes five years of competition in five years goes through.
A long and difficult journey to nationals
Bonds is often asked why she picked BYU when all her sisters went to Arizona. The answer is simple: BYU recruited her only to be a hurdler, and she “adored” then-BYU sprints and hurdles coach Stephani Perkins. But Perkins left BYU and took a job at Southern Illinois a week before Bonds was scheduled to move into her college dorm.
“That is part of why I transitioned into the heptathlon (after her freshman season), she said. “I was not with the coach that I got recruited by, and I just felt like I should change it up. It wasn’t working.”
Also, Bonds battled an illness that went undiagnosed almost her entire freshman year that left her tired and lifeless. Finally, after some blood tests, it was determined to be mononucleosis.
“That was an awful experience,” she said.
During her sophomore season, some foot pain she had dealt with since high school became unbearable, a stress fracture never properly healed, and doctors decided she needed surgery. She got a bone fusion, because the bone had split, and a plate and eight screws were inserted into her foot.
Through it all, she never thought about quitting, giving up, or throwing in the towel.
“I always believed in myself, but I felt like I was not getting the results that I knew I was capable of getting,’ she said. “So I was like, ‘I am sticking it out, and will try to accomplish everything I want to accomplish, even if they don’t seem reasonable.’”
Under the direction of Lott-Hogan and sprints coach Kyle Grossarth, Bonds has healed up and improved so much the past year that she’s weighing the idea of turning pro when her college career ends, as one of her sisters did.
Lott-Hogan has become Bonds’ biggest role model in the sport.
“She was an Olympian, and she is just amazing,” Bonds said. “She is so calm and collected, which you have to have as a multi(-event) athlete. It is so awesome to be working with someone that has been through what I’ve been through. So, yeah, I definitely look up to her.”
Lott-Hogan said Bonds thrives because she has a great way of overcoming setbacks and subpar performances and moves on to the next event with a minimal amount of moping. Bonds said her mom taught her long ago to rein in her emotions.
“The mental aspect is something I learned a long time ago when I did my first heptathlon in high school,” she said. “My mom said it is two long days and you can’t be on a roller coaster of emotions. I just learned to stay steady, and a rule we implemented was that I have five minutes to be sad after an event doesn’t go well, but after that five minutes I have to be happy again, and start preparing for the next one.”
Marrying an understanding athlete
Bonds married former BYU football player Kyle Vassau in December 2024, and the one-time linebacker has become her biggest supporter. The Carlsbad, California, native can often be seen at her meets, home or away, cheering on Bonds in all her events — including the meet-ending 800 meters, which she hates.
“Being a former athlete, he gets it,” she said. “He knows when I’m exhausted, or that I have to eat a certain way, which is super nice. I don’t have to explain it all to him. … He travels to all my meets and is my biggest cheerleader. He is kind of living vicariously now through me because football didn’t quite work out for him.”
Vassau has one more semester left to graduate and has already started his own insurance agency, which is doing well. He also knows not to mess with Bonds’ pre-meet superstitions and rituals, including her insistence on easting at a Vietnamese restaurant the night before meets.
“I always get pho (a soup dish),” she said. “That is something that is non-negotiable, for sure.”
Another have-to is getting her nails and makeup done before races.
“Because you gotta feel good and look good to run good,” she said.
Besides, everyone knows you don’t tell Zoey Bonds there is something she can’t do.
