‘I think about him all the time’: Wichita track star wins title for fallen father
There’s a reason why the final 10 meters of a 300-meter hurdles race are considered to be the most revealing.
It’s the length of the race remaining after clearing the eighth and final hurdle, the stretch on the track that separates champions from almost champions.
Countless hours of training is the requirement just to reach this moment, but that alone doesn’t always guarantee glory. Sometimes a competitor must dig deep and find a reason greater than themselves to accomplish something they didn’t know was possible.
And when that moment came for Adryanna Shelby, the Wichita Northwest sophomore had her reason to push her to the Class 6A state championship in the 300-meter girls hurdles race at the Kansas high school state track meet May 28 at Cessna Stadium.
Shelby was stride-for-stride with Shawnee Mission Northwest’s Olivia Pixton entering the final hurdle, but it was Shelby who found the extra burst in the final 10 meters to prevail in a winning time of 46.66 seconds, less than a tenth of a second faster than Pixton’s time of 46.75.
“You have to push yourself to your limits,” Shelby said. “For a minute there, I was doubting myself. But I just kept pushing myself because I know my dad would want me to keep pushing and keep thinking happy thoughts. I know that’s what he would have wanted.”
‘I still think about him all the time’
When Adryanna was young, she loved tagging along with her father to his football practices.
Tyron Shelby was a youth football coach in the Wichita Tigers organization and had a passion for sports, which created a special father-daughter bond.
Adryanna inherited her father’s competitive spirit: she always wanted to win his approval by showing she was just as fast as any boy on his football team.
“She was determined to play football at one point,” said Jennifer Dirting, her mother. “He always loved how competitive she was and how she never wanted to lose. But he wouldn’t let her play. He said, ‘No one hurts my baby.’”
Tyron was ecstatic when Adryanna discovered her talent in the hurdle races when she was in seventh grade. When she started competing in regional indoor track meets, he helped instill a “never-give-up” mentality and always tried to be there to cheer her on.
“We were pretty close,” Adryanna said. “He would support me through everything.”
One week, her father was cheering her on at a meet this winter. The next week, he was gone forever. Tyron, a father of three, died unexpectedly on Jan. 18 at the age of 41.
Adryanna’s world was upended by the tragedy. She stopped attending school and even stopped running hurdles, engulfed by sadness that had extinguished her passion for track.
“It was really tough,” Adryanna said. “I kind of shut off. But I knew I had to get back up and start doing what I usually do and get back to working hard.
“I still think about him all the time.”
Grieving the loss of a parent never ends, but Adryanna found a way to move forward from the tragedy by dedicating her success in track to her father.
Her mother believes it wasn’t a coincidence that Adryanna had her best indoor practice of her career when she returned to the Shocker Track Club.
“I think everyone in our family was trying to be strong for everybody else,” Jennifer Dirting said. “That first practice back, she was running past everybody. I guess you could say it was her exhale from everything because ever since then, she’s been incredible.”
‘I knew I had to find a way to go faster’
Northwest hurdles coach Tom Allen, who doubles as the hurdles coach for Shocker Track Club, was at that practice this winter when Adryanna returned.
She didn’t say much when she came back, he remembered, but her intensity and work ethic was on another level. She was already a good hurdler, proven by her fourth-place finish out of the slow heat in Class 6A as a freshman in the 300-meter hurdles, but she returned with a desperate desire to become a great hurdler.
“Her lead leg was standing straight and it wasn’t coming down the way you want it to,” Allen said. “You want it to be slightly bent so you can really snap it down once it gets over the hurdle. You don’t want to fly over the hurdle, you want to step over it quick. She completely transformed her form so much that when I watch her today, it just looks effortless. She’s snapping over them without any problem.”
The coach believes it was the work Adryanna did in February that laid the foundation for becoming a state champion in May.
For months, Allen drilled her on maintaining clean form in the back-half of the race. Adryanna became used to running practice sessions without the first four hurdles on the track, then picking up speed and finishing strong over the final four hurdles.
“We really worked on keeping her form even when she’s getting fatigued,” Allen said. “That really helped her in races when it came time to make a push.”
Those drills had a golden payoff: Adryanna’s form going over the eighth and final hurdle in the state race was flawless. While Adryanna and her competition jumped at the same exact time, Adryanna’s form allowed her to be quicker over the hurdle and land faster to gain a half-step advantage.
From there, Adryanna’s determination took over.
“I was just thinking, ‘You’ve got to win this,’” Adryanna said. “I heard the girl beside me, so I knew I had to find a way to go faster.”
‘Running was her out from everything else’
Watching from her spot in the stands at Cessna Stadium near the finish line, Jennifer Dirting’s heart was in her throat.
Down on the track, her daughter was neck-and-neck for the lead going over the final hurdle.
“I was going, ‘Oh lord, she’s got it! Oh no, she doesn’t got it,’” Dirting said. “It was back and forth, back and forth. But there at the end, you could tell she just wanted it a little bit more.”
Once the nerves subsided, Dirting wasn’t surprised Adryanna found a little something extra to pull out the win.
“She’s so determined and she has that I-won’t-lose drive, just like her father,” Dirting said. “I think she used his passing as her out. Like running was her out from everything else. And that’s what she used to win.”
It capped a superb state track meet for Adryanna, who not only won gold in the 300-meter hurdles, but also silver in the 100-meter hurdles in 15.26 seconds and ran a leg on Northwest’s state-qualifying 4x1 and 4x4 relay teams.
Not much made sense to her trying to navigate life as a 16-year-old after losing her father. Track was an escape to provide some sense of normalcy again.
In a way, becoming a state champion made her feel closer to her father than ever.
“I think he would be super proud of me right now,” Adryanna said with a gold medal draped around her neck. “I’m very proud of myself because of how hard I worked and pushed for this. I know he’s looking down on me right now and he’s happy for me. I know if he was here, he would give me a big hug. I’m so happy I made him proud.”
This story was originally published June 13, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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