High School Career Over, Sprinter Combest Has Decisions

Sidelined by an injured hamstring, the best high school sprinter in the country leaned against a fence, watching as heats of the state 100-meter championship went on without him.

Casey Combest, owner of four national high school sprinting records, was asked how he would have fared.

“I would have walked it,” he said, smiling and waving dismissively toward the other runners, now walking back down the track in the morning light.

Standing nearby, Combest’s coach at Owensboro High School, Bob O’Brien, heard the comment. “Come on now,” he scolded. “No Prefontaines.”

It is an appropriate comparison. Though a sprinter, Combest calls to mind both the cockiness and the passion for running of middle-distance star Steve Prefontaine, who died in a 1975 car crash.

“I like the way he went about things,” Combest said of “Pre,” whose single-minded focus on track Combest also tries to emulate.

“That’s all I want to do in my life,” he said. “That’s the only thing.”

At 18, Combest already has an impressive resume. He owns national high school indoor records at 55, 60 and 100 meters, and at 100 yards. His 6.57-second 60-meter performance at a March indoor meet in Ohio is just .17 seconds off the world record.

Before straining his right hamstring two weeks ago, Combest was gearing up for an equally impressive outdoor season. At a regional meet in Kentucky last month, he ran the 100 meters in 10.5 seconds.

Combest has done all this while training on a concrete track at Owensboro, without benefit of a weight-training program and with the physical limitations of a 5-foot-7 frame that makes his stride shorter than that of bigger sprinters.

Overcoming those challenges may be Combest’s most impressive achievement as an athlete, but they don’t draw nearly as much attention as the color of his skin. He is white.

Blacks have dominated the elite levels of American sprinting for decades, and for many spectators, the sight of Combest winning races is a novelty.

“Not fitting the mold in his event makes him stand out,” said Kentucky track coach Don Weber, who recruited and signed Combest, only to see him fail to make a qualifying score on the ACT exam.

Combest refuses to see his success in black-and-white terms. He says the only race he cares about is the one on the track.

“I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” he said. “Every girlfriend I’ve had since seventh grade has been black. I grew up around blacks.”

The influence of black culture on Combest is clear in his speech and his mannerisms, something he said his white friends teased him about when he was younger.

“I never tried to act black,” he said. “That’s just the way I am. Everyone has their own style.”

To Auburn track coach Mel Rosen, a former U.S. Olympic sprint coach, Combest refutes the stereotypical notion that white men can’t sprint.

“I think there may be white sprinters out there who we don’t know about because they’re playing other sports,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why a white sprinter can’t be a great athlete. They have them in Norway; they have them in Russia.”

The keys to Combest’s success are both psychological and physiological.

On the physiological side, a combination of quick-firing neurons and fast-twitch muscles give Combest a start that leaves most opponents several body lengths behind just 20 or 30 meters into a race.

“He’s just like a little machine,” Weber said as he played a tape of Combest’s record-setting 10.55-second performance in the 100 meters in February. Weber watched as Combest broke smoothly from the blocks, accelerated away from the pack in the first few strides of the race, and zipped to an easy win.

O’Brien, the Owensboro coach, recalled being at a meet with Combest last winter when former 100-meter world record holder Leroy Burrell approached him about Combest’s start.

“He said, ‘What’d you do to him? He’s so fundamentally correct,”’ O’Brien recalled.

Combest works obsessively on his starts, practicing them in a hall of the home where he lives with his mother and 4-year-old half-sister, Brooklyn, in the town of Henderson. Combest’s mother and father, a top high school sprinter in Kentucky in the 1970s, divorced when he was 10.

The well-worn hallway carpet is evidence of Combest’s psychological edge, his Prefontaine-like passion for running and determination to improve.

“So many kids go through and after time goes by, they’re forgotten,” he said. “I don’t want my name ever to be forgotten.”

Combest’s intensity was apparent to Weber from the moment they met.

“When I first met him, it was clear to me that running was important to him beyond any person his age that I’ve ever run across,” Weber said.

Some might say Combest has been too single-minded. He nearly failed to graduate from Owensboro and needed to retake an English exam to get his diploma.

His failure to reach the minimum ACT score for NCAA eligibility means he will attend Wallace State, an Alabama junior college, instead of Kentucky next year.

“For a variety of reasons, he’s chosen not to do the work,” Weber said. “I don’t believe he’s as disciplined in the other areas of his life as he is in running.”

Though he has been approached by shoe companies about turning pro out of high school, Combest said he is determined to go to college.

Weber, who coached world-class sprinter Tim Harden at Kentucky, said the structure of a college track program will be crucial to Combest’s development as a sprinter.

“The shoe companies, it’s a cutthroat business,” he said. “You perform, or they’re looking for someone else. ... I think everybody understands that there are better possibilities than hooking up with a shoe company.”

O’Brien believes those possibilities include Olympic medals and more record-breaking performances.

“I think he could be one of the best sprinters ever,” he said.