NA grad Owens looking to be ‘ best athlete on earth’
Many people were surprised to find out North Allegheny grad and star decathlete Ayden Owens was leaving Southern California to transfer to Michigan after a stellar freshman season. Turns out, the bigger surprise might be that he didn’t enroll at Michigan sooner.
“I said out of high school that I would have been at Michigan if it was in L. A.,” Owens joked.
Owens, a six- time PIAA champion in high school, said he doesn’t regret anything about attending USC as a freshman. But now that he has had his fun in the sun on the West Coast, he’s ready to move back to the midwest and narrow his focus on the two things he wants most in his athletic career: an NCAA championship and an Olympic gold medal.
“With USC, the location worked out. I was ready to get out and experience the warm weather and I really felt like I was at college, so I got wooed by all that,” Owens said. “Now that I’m more mature, I understand that I’ve just got to focus on my mission as an athlete and a student. I’m really prioritizing that stuff.”
The main reason behind Owens’ decision to switch schools is the lack of a dedicated decathlon coach at USC. The multi- event assistant who recruited Owens, Sheldon Blockburger, left for Arizona prior to Owens’ freshman season. Now, Blockburger’s replacement, Carjay Lyles, is also leaving the team.
Owens said that because he transferred outside the Pac- 12, USC granted him his immediate release and he will not have to sit out the 2019- 20 season.
“It was all about stability for me,” Owens said. “After seeing how this year went, it was a great year, but just how it ended up and kind of how the coaches aren’t stable, I was looking for just a better situation that can help me in the long term.”
Meanwhile, Michigan track coach Jerry Clayton has experience coaching decathletes at the Olympics, where Owens expects to be competing for Puerto Rico in 2020 if all goes according to plan.
“My goals for next year are to win NCAAs and go to the Olympics and make 2020 Tokyo and compete for Puerto Rico,” Owens said. “I think I need to be coached by someone who’s coached at that level for the decathlon and someone who can coach me year- round. I want a
decathlon coach, and Michigan did provide that.”
Despite the lack of stability on the coaching staff at USC, Owens burst onto the scene as a freshman with one of the greatest debuts a collegiate decathlete has ever made.
At the Bryan Clay Invitational April 16- 18 in Azusa, Calif., Owens put on a show in his first outdoor competition as a Trojan. He set personal records in the 100 meters ( 10.43 seconds), long jump ( 24 feet, 5 inches), 400 meters ( 47.6), discus ( 141- 6), javelin ( 168) and 1,500 meters ( 4: 28), while also winning the 110meter hurdles ( 13.91).
Owens raced past defending Pac- 12 decathlon champion Harrison Williams of Stanford in the final 200 meters of the 1,500 to clinch the top spot at the event with an astounding 8,130- point performance. It was his first time breaking the prestigious 8,000- point mark, and it gave him the highest decathlon score in the world in 2019 — as well as the third- highest mark ever for someone under 19 years old.
He then got off to a similarly hot start at the NCAA championships in June, but his inability to clear the bar on the high jump left him without any points in the event and kept him from making it onto the podium. Still, Owens’ performance during the season was enough to earn him Pac- 12 Freshman of the Year honors on his way out the door to Ann Arbor.
“I don’t regret anything that happened at USC,” Owens said. “I don’t think it was a mistake going there. I’m just looking forward to a change of opportunity at Michigan and I’m looking forward to what the future has in store.”
His record- setting performance in April qualified Owens for a spot in the Pan- American Games in Peru later this month, but with all the moving around he has been dealing with since the end of the school year, Owens decided to sit out the Pan- Am Games to make sure he’s fully rested for his upcoming sophomore season — not to mention his quest to make the 2020 Olympic team.
“Since I was 9, I started getting into track and I was like, ‘ I’m going to the Olympics,’” Owens said. “I always told people that, and when I was young I wasn’t necessarily the most humble kid, so I always let people know how good I was.
“My goal has been to be on top of the world and be the best athlete on earth.”