He was the fastest hurdler in the country, but COVID-19 stopped his quest for a record
Lamont Wright planned to do more than just win his first state championship as a senior at Southridge.
He wanted to win two and break at least one Florida High School Athletic Association record along the way.
The lineage of the 300-meter hurdles record is a storied one in Miami.
Central’s Bershawn Jackson, who won bronze in the 400 hurdles at the 2008 Summer Olympics, held the state-championship record from 2001-2018. In 2018, Northwestern’s Thomas Burns, who now runs for the Texas A&M Aggies, broke Jackson’s mark of 36.01 seconds by running the race in 35.90. All of Wright’s preparation heading into his senior season was geared around the former Bull’s number: 35.90.
But first, he needed to beat “Batman.” Jackson is an easy target to chase with his flashy nickname and Olympic pedigree, and beating him means hitting a nice, round number at 36 seconds.
Wright only needed three meets to hit it in 2020 and he didn’t even need his best run to do it. Gene Mason remembers watching it as he leaned on the fence near the finish line, talking with a rival coach at the Sam Burley Hall of Fame Invitational in March.
From the opposite side of the track at Tropical Park, Mason watched Wright fall behind early. “I don’t know,” the coach said, “if he’s going to have enough to recover and catch that guy.” Wright had dealt with a foot injury in the offseason and, Mason figured, he was still ramping back up to full strength.
Wright charged from behind and set a new personal record: 36.00. He had beaten “Batman” and run the fastest 300 in the entire country.
“The coach looked at me and was like, ‘Well, coach, I think you underestimated that guy,’” Mason said.
Wright never got a chance to trim the next 10th of a second he needed to beat Burns, though. Three days later, Wright breezed to a win in a Greater Miami Athletic Conference Qualifier in 37.51.
The next day, sports effectively stopped when the NBA suspended its season because of the COVID-19 outbreak. The FHSAA suspended spring sports a few days later and finally canceled the spring seasons in April. Wright’s chase for a state title and record ended without warning.
For the time being, everything was thrown into limbo for Wright. He didn’t have a college home yet, so he posted a short video with his times on Twitter trying to garner more attention. He now spends more of his time working his part-time job at Publix than he does working on his craft.
“I was like, OK, this is going to be hard. I’m kind of built to basically love track,” Wright said. “I’ve been around track for a long time, so when I finally got the news that everything was getting canceled I was like, This is supposed to be my season to come back, to basically take over everything that I own. So it was kind of hard.”
Family business
Theresa Wright spent most of her life looking for a track star of her own to groom.
She had once been a track star, too. She ran throughout her youth South Florida and up through middle school before she got married at 16 and had her first child at 17.
“My dream,” she said, “was to raise a runner.”
There were lots of close calls.
Leticia Joseph, her oldest daughter, ran at Southridge and now runs Down South Xtreme, a track and field program in southern Miami-Dade County.
Tawana Collier, another of daughter, ran track all the way up until middle school. Wright has four biological siblings and three step siblings, and those three are the only ones his mother was able to get to follow in her footsteps.
The whole extended family was at the beach one day for a family party when Wright was 5 and his mother was looking for her next pupil. She lined up all the cousins in a row and signaled for them to start.
“When she said, ‘On your mark, get set, go,’ I just looked back,” Wright said. “I beat everybody.”
A few days later, Wright went to his first track practice at Richmond Park. Since then, track and field has almost always been Wright’s only sport with a brief, one-year football diversion in middle school the only exception.
“He saw how much I loved football, as well, so he wanted to go ahead on and give me one year of football,” his mother said. “He gave me a year of football just to say, OK, I tried it. Here you go. He was actually really good at it, but that was not his cup of tea.”
When he was young, Wright unlocked speed by running around with Antwan Collier in the yard and at parks.
Collier, who’s actually Wright’s nephew, is now a defensive back for the Central Florida Knights and he used his younger uncle as a “tackle dummy,” Wright’s mother said. Eventually, he got tired of being the punching bag, so he ran and ran to get away from the budding football star.
He ran in almost every event imaginable. He started with the 100 and 200 dashes, but he tried out the 400 dash, too, and even the 800 run. He ran in 400 and 1,600 relays. Wright wasn’t shy to try anything a coach asked.
He mostly stayed away from the hurdles, though. He never ran them as a kid and didn’t run them as a freshman with the Spartans in 2017.
Wright tried it almost on a whim his sophomore year. His mother saw his sprint times plateauing and Joseph liked Wright’s gait. He ran with a bound, so the two women took Wright out to the track just a few days before the season began. His technique was a mess and his times were up and down, but within three months he was good enough to win bronze at the Class 4A championship with a personal record of 37.61.
“The form was like terrible terrible,” Wright said. “Arms straight out like I’m flying like a bird.”
Wright transferred to South Dade for his junior season and his personal record dropped to 36.98 to win the Region 4-4A championship before he broke a bone in his hand. Wright ran nearly two seconds slower at the 4A championship a week later and finished seventh. The winner was an athlete he beat in the region final.
A record pace
A few weeks after his senior season unexpectedly ended, Wright found a video of himself winning a hurdles race and attached to a tweet.
“Due to COVID-19 track season has been postponed,” Wright wrote. “With that being said my name is Lamont Wright and I am an unsigned senior at Miami Southridge Senior High School.”
He attached his two personal records — 13.93 in the 110 hurdles and 36.00 in the 300 — and a frustrating hashtag: #unsigned. More than 250 have retweeted him and another 600 liked the tweet. The 10-second Twitter highlight has been viewed more than 22,000 times.
Injuries and his delayed decision to even try out the hurdles mean he never became a blue-chip prospect. Almost as soon as Wright established himself as the fastest 300 hurdler in the country, the athletic world slipped into limbo.
He had started to hear from the Florida Gators, LSU Tigers and Texas Tech Red Raiders, but the coronavirus pandemic led the NCAA to give all spring athletes an extra year of eligibility. Rosters were suddenly more crowded than teams were anticipating. Wright will instead head to Ohio to run at Division II Tiffin University, which won back-to-back national championships in 2016 and 2017.
“We didn’t see the best of Lamont,” Mason said. “They don’t know him around the country probably yet, but they’ll know his name.”
Back with the Spartans for his senior season, Wright was just starting to ramp up to full speed in March when the season ended. His preseason training only began in December because of the foot injury, so the push for 35 seconds had just begun.
Still, Wright’s early-season mark of 36.00 would have been best in the state in any season not featuring Burns since 2002 and the best in the United States for any season not featuring burns since 2013. Blanche Ely’s Jevon Williams, the reigning 3A champion in the hurdles, had Florida’s best time last year at 36.54.
“Knowing his history, seeing what he was doing in practice,” said Erin McCray, who coaches Wright in the hurdles, “he definitely would’ve run 35 and probably low 35 at the pace that he was moving.”
When the season ended, Williams, who has signed a national letter of intent with the Clemson Tigers, had the second fastest time in 3A behind Wright. Northwestern’s Rasmus Wright had the third fastest. The battle for the 300 title was going to run through South Florida and Wright was the target for everyone to chase.
He was most concerned with chasing history, though — concerned with a record chase that never materialized.
“That’s where we were heading,” his mother said. “We would’ve had it this year. We definitely would’ve had it this year, without a doubt.”
Other notables
▪ North Miami senior Will Raoul led Class 4A in both the shot put and the discus throw at the time of the shutdown. His shot put distance led all of Florida.
▪ Hallandale’s John Fergusan, a first-team all-Broward County selection by the Herald in 2019, was the Class 2A leader in both the shot put and the discus. Gulliver Prep’s Westley Neal, who plans to play football for the FCS Rhode Island Rams next year, sat in second in the shot put at 16.86 meters.
▪ Blanche Ely’s Romario Jackson led Class 3A — and the state — in the discus.
▪ Damarcus Fleming — a three-time state champion for the Bulls, and the Herald’s reigning Miami-Dade County Boys’ Track and Field Athlete of the Year — was on track to add even more hardware this year at Northwestern. Fleming, who has signed with LSU, was leading the state in both the 100 and 200 dashes after winning state titles in both events last year.
was a first-team all-county selection
were both first-team selections
▪ The senior hurdles crop was even deeper than three vying for supremacy in the 300. Cardinal Gibbons’ Craig Saddler was leading Class 2A in both the 110 and 300, and St. Thomas Aquinas’ Tyler Drew was leading 4A in the 300 and sat second in the 110. Saddler will run for the North Carolina Tar Heels next year.
▪ Jackson Marseille, another senior for the Chiefs, was leading the 2A in the high jump when the season ended. He’ll compete for the South Carolina Gamecocks next year.
▪ Carol City’s Maxeau Joseph, a first-team all-county pick as part of Carol City’s state-champion 1,600 relay in 2019, trailed only Saddler in the 300 for 2A. Carol City’s 1,600 relay once again had the best time in 2A at the time of the shutdown.
▪ Dujuan Baker and Ethan Hanna, both of whom were first-team all-county selections as part of Piper’s state-champion 1,600 relay in 2019, were both back competing as seniors to repeat in the event. They also had added the help of fellow senior Wendel Rolle to the team.
▪ Ferguson’s Noah Bitter, a first-team all-county selection in 2019, was once again South Florida’s top performer in the pole vault. The senior also sat in the top five in 4A.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 11:31 AM.
