NaJ Watson
AJ Henderson - Georgia Southern Athletics

T&F Feature: For NaJ Watson ‘the leaps just keep coming’

The freshman competes in the NCAA East Championship Prelims this week.

By Marc Gignac

NCAA Live Results | ESPN+ Thursday | ESPN+ Saturday 

STATESBORO – NaJ Watson got off to a great start.

It was the first meet of the outdoor track and field season for Georgia Southern, just a few weeks after the Eagles had finished fifth at the Sun Belt Indoor Championships. It was at the Black and Gold Invite, hosted by UCF in Orlando, Florida.

Watson came out of the blocks smoothly, turned on the jets and finished the 200-meter dash strong.

23.23

New personal best, the fastest time in program history, the fastest mark in the country at the time (now tied for 64th), and it qualified the freshman for the NCAA Championship East Prelims this week. Watson will run in the first round Thursday at 8:45 p.m. at North Florida in Jacksonville. If she advances, she will compete in the quarterfinals Saturday at 7:50 p.m. A top-12 finish sends her to the National Championship Finals meet in Austin, Texas, June 7-10.

Usually in track and field, there is a bit of a build up towards posting top times. Rest after the indoor season, begin heavy training at the start of the outdoor season and taper off towards the end, ensuring bodies are rested and fresh to notch top times at the conference championship. That’s the conventional wisdom, but not much about the way Watson competes is conventional. She is merely scratching the surface of her potential.

“I've told her, I have no idea how good she's going to be,’’ says first-year head coach David Neville. “She is unbelievably talented, and just raw, raw talent. As a coach, it’s like, oh man, this is amazing. There's a whole lot more of this inside of her. And I don't have a clue two years from now where she's going to be, but I know it's going to be special.”

Watson did not start competing in track until she was in eighth grade. She used to do a lot of racing at recess in middle school or messing around with older cousins and friends in her neighborhood. One of her teachers noticed how fast she was and mentioned it to one of the track coaches. She had interest in soccer, softball and basketball, but those faded as track came to the forefront.

Former Eagle coach Kelly Carter visited her high school, Phillip Simmons in Charleston, South Carolina, and convinced her to come on a visit in February of 2022.

“I met all the football coaches, all the staff and everyone here and some of the members of the track team,” recalls Watson. “I really liked the campus. All the staff here in general, I thought were really nice. It felt like a family environment to me. I just decided to come here because I thought I could fit in.”

Carter resigned in May, and Georgia Southern turned the reigns over to Neville, an Olympic gold medalist who had just finished his fifth season as an assistant coach at Tennessee. Neville immediately began turning his attention to the roster and doing his research on the student-athletes who had committed.

“For us in track and field, it's pretty much the numbers,” says Neville. “The numbers don't lie. So you're able to see all right, there's some potential there with NaJ, and kind of see where we go from here. It's really hard in that short timeframe until I really get an opportunity to learn more about them as an individual, their characteristics and the type of person that they are.”

NaJ Watson
Watson took third in the 200-meter dash at the Sun Belt Outdoor Championship.

Watson was also doing her research. In addition to finding out Neville had competed and coached at the highest levels, she found that he had also served as the worship pastor and director of young adult ministries at Santa Clarita Christian Fellowship Church and as associate pastor at Elevate City Church.

“One thing me and my mom really liked is that he's a pastor in the church,” says Watson. “My parents always gave us the choice if we wanted to get involved in the church, and I always did but I just never knew how to start. Coming here and meeting Coach Neville and a lot of girls on the team who are into it all. I thought it was nice to be somewhere I could connect more with God.”

Nothing Watson did in the offseason workouts in the fall stood out. She tried to prepare as best she could for the rigors of college track by training all summer with her high school coach but still found the workouts difficult. The repetitive workouts got easier, but as far as experience goes, Watson is a blank canvas, which has turned out to be an advantage.

“The great part about it is that as a coach, you can mold the athlete into almost what you want to mold them into,” says Neville. “There are a lot of deficiencies that many other athletes have built up over the years because they just do things wrong and as a coach, you have to adjust it. NaJ has what we call a short training age, so it’s easier to break some of those habits. There's a lot of technical work that we tried to do, and there’s the ability to have huge leaps in performances, because they're so young in training age. She was a 24.30 200-meter runner coming out of high school, and she has already been over a second faster, which is amazing. That doesn't happen, typically. Because of the young training age, she's able to take huge leaps by us changing just a few things in year one, and then we start fine-tuning some of those things moving forward even more. The leaps just keep coming.”

Much of Watson’s improvement comes from her starts, which she and Neville have been working on diligently.

“Just trying to change some of the angles that she comes out the blocks in because you can get yourself into bad positions that cause you to stumble out the blocks, or you just don't get as much power push off in your first 10 meters of a race,” says Neville. “So for us, we're really trying to work on making sure that she's in proper positions, body positions and angles, so that we can have a great beginning of the race. I'm never really concerned about her when she's up and going. It's really about the acceleration.”

Managing a race has also been an area of improvement for Watson, and she has gained a lot of knowledge from talking and studying race strategy with Neville.

“Before I run, he talks to me about how to run my race, like how I should do it and the setup of it” says Watson. “I don't have a lot of experience, so when I come out here to run, I actually don't know how to run it. I like that he prepares me and tells me how to run it. Sometimes I don't do it right, but I'll attempt it, and I think that's helped.”

No matter her results this week, Watson has already earned a trip to Track Town U.S.A. - Eugene, Oregon – for the USATF U20 Championships July 6-9. There, she will have the opportunity to make the U20 US Team that will compete in Chile in the fall. She has come a long way this season and is eager to keep improving.

“I didn’t know what U20 was until Coach Neville told me about it, but it’s an exciting opportunity, and I’ll see what I can do at that point,” says Watson.
 

 

Read More