Schultz a track and field sensation
Excellence a family tradition for New Westminster high school student who’s dreaming big
It’s not the easiest mantra for a busy high school student to live up to each and every day, but in Nina Schultz’s world, its words have come to represent a simple truth in her quest for excellence.
“My grandpa says to me almost every day ‘eat well, sleep well, train well,’” said Schultz, the track and field phenom from New Westminster Secondary School, who, in the most basic measure of overall athletic skill, sits at the very top of Canada’s entire female 2016 graduating class.
“He has told me that so many times, it’s just engraved in my mind.”
In late March, at the UBC Invitational, the 17-year-old Schultz competed in the first heptathlon of her 2016 outdoor season, and the result she produced as a runner, jumper and thrower in the demanding seven-event discipline revealed itself with a form that belied both her own and the calendar’s early date.
Schultz not only shone with four personal-best times, she won all seven events to score a landmark 5,391 points, a total which almost assures her of a spot this July at IAAF World Junior Track and Field Championships in Bydgoszcz, Poland. As long as that total holds as one of the top two Canadian performances this season, she’s in.
It was somewhat akin to getting an A-plus grade for the term on the first day of class.
“I think the best thing for me (this season) was the UBC Open, because not only was it my first hep, but I got the world junior standard,” said the Hyacks’ standout, who is the No. 1-ranked junior heptathlete in Canada, and this past summer finished 11th at the World Youth championships in Cali, Colombia by scoring a Canadian age-group record 5,406 points.
Schultz, in fact, has followed hot on the heels of The Province’s 2013 Head of the Class award winner Georgia Ellenwood, the Langley Secondary grad and Olympic hopeful who won four-straight B.C. high school heptathlon titles before embarking on a college career with the Wisconsin Badgers.
Yet life’s pull has Schultz going in so many different directions as she relishes her final few weeks as a high school senior.
Soon, she’ll don cap and gown for her high school graduation ceremonies, and she will continue to be inspired by the stories she would hear as a young girl, stories about her own family tree, one rooted in the deepest traditions of international track and field.
WORLD-RECORD GENES
Schultz’s grandfather, Duan Qiyan, and grandmother Zheng Fengrong, both national champion high jumpers, met while they were members of the Chinese national track and field team.
Schultz’s grandmother, in fact, jumped 1.77 metres back in 1957, becoming the first Chinese female to hold a sports world record. Due to the fact China did not compete in the Olympics from 1952-84, she was denied her greatest stage, but she was later selected as one of eight to carry the Olympic flag to open the 2008 Beijing Games.
“And when she was jumping, she was scissoring the height,” Schultz has said of the form employed by jumpers in the days before the Brill Bend, the modern-day reverse method pioneered by Mission’s Debbie Brill.
“Any time I think about that, I just think about how amazing that was.”
These days, when not back in China, the pair work closely with Schultz on many aspects of her training regimen, but as is the case with worldclass multi-event athletes, one coach can never really cover the myriad aspects that go into preparing for the heptathlon’s seven uniquely different disciplines of the 200 metres, 800 metres, 100-metre hurdles, high jump, long jump, javelin and shot put.
“My grandpa does his best to demonstrate things to me, but mostly he will tell me to go and watch certain professionals on YouTube,” said Schultz, who, as a member of the New Westminster Spartans club program, has also been coached over the years by the husband-and-wife team of Besnik and Tatjana Mece.
In projecting Schultz’s potential, Besnik Mece sees a huge capacity for her to improve in so many different areas, all of which relate directly to her many events.
There is her ideal centre of gravity over the bar in high jump (1.79 metres PB), the “brain-to-muscle” reaction time which suggests a great sprint-hurdles future (14.44 seconds, PB), and the personal-best 2:24.18 she clocked in the 800m at UBC suggests she is fine-tuning a pretty impressive middle-distance motor.
“I think she can high jump 1.85 in the future, and in the long jump (5.82 metres PB) I think she can go over six metres,” Besnik said. “I think she is one of the best from my point of view, with so much capacity for the future. What’s missing is the time of training.”
A lot of that is starting to change this season as Schultz, quite surprisingly, is focusing solely on her track career for the very first time.
“I think soccer has always been my favourite sport because I love the team environment, but I think track is my calling, so I’ll stick with it,” said Schultz, who last season played on a youth club team where she sustained her share of knocks and injuries.
“This year I decided to play it safe, and I definitely feel stronger, and I’m injury-free.”
The object of intense recruiting from a number of top U.S. college programs, Schultz eventually chose Kansas State over Georgia, and thus will begin her collegiate career next fall in the U.S. Midwest.
“I think I am definitely going to miss home,” she said, “but it’s going to be a good experience to learn to handle things on my own.”
GOLDEN FUTURE
To say Nina Schultz has owned the podium the past two summers at the Subway B.C. high school track and field championships is an understatement.
Last year, on her way to a secondstraight B.C. heptathlon title, she became just the fourth girl in the 33-year history of the event to break the 5,000-point barrier with 5,046 points.
En route to be being named the meet’s top female athlete for two straight years, she has also dominated the meet’s individual jumping events.
Schultz has won gold in the high jump and the long jump for two straight years, and is the favourite to three-peat in both when the 2016 championships open June 2 in Nanaimo. Schultz has also won B.C. gold in the 1,600m relay and triple jump. In total, that’s eight gold medals the past two seasons.
Yet she’s also making a habit of carrying momentum from the high school championships onto the international stage.
At last season’s World Youth heptathlon competition, when it came time for the high jump, her favourite event and the one where she and her grandmother share such a special lineage, Schultz was at her best.
“After the competition, my grandma actually asked me what was wrong,” laughed Schultz, whose personal-best leap of 1.79 metres surpassed the scissor-style 1.77-metre former world record Zheng Fengrong had set 58 years previous.
Schultz had originally hoped to jump 1.82, and looked strong enough to do it, but on the jump that topped her grandmother’s PB, she suffered a sprained ankle.
“I didn’t tell my family about that until after the competition,” she said. “My grandma was so proud when she found out that I had finished the competition on a sprained ankle. It’s definitely been an advantage for me to have both of them. They were the first ones to get me involved in track and I would not be where I am today without them.”
Adds Besnik Mece: “You have to have a goal every step of your life. Being an Olympian, that is her goal and with hard work she could be one of them.”
It’s something her grandparents were never given the opportunity to accomplish.
And so Nina Schultz will continue her family’s chase of that dream. She’ll eat well, sleep well and train well. It’s simple advice well taken.