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Kendall Baisden: All Speed
by Jeff Hollobaugh

The game of sportswriting is that you write about fantastic people all the time, and you tend to use superlatives liberally: the fastest, the best ever, the best since, and so on. And then once in a great while you find yourself writing about a young athlete you know is going to outstrip every superlative you can generate.

Many years ago, I remember talking to a coach in California for an interview on one of his sprinters who was considered the best in the country. At the end, he said something like, “But we’ve got a young one coming up who’s going to be way better.” And then he started telling me about a kid named Marion Jones.

Fast forward to 1997. I went to Ann Arbor’s Buhr Park to see Jason Hartmann run. I remember standing next to the late Richard Chenault and watching as the second-place kid, a freshman teammate of Hartmann’s, produced a dazzling kick. This time I was the man looking into the crystal ball: “That’s the kid who’s going to be famous,” I told Richard. And every time Dathan Ritzenhein did something big after that, Richard would remind me that for one brief moment in my life, I knew what I was talking about.

Then, a couple years ago, I was returning something at a Walmart and ran into Swift TC coach Furman Tate in the customer service line. He was so excited he could barely speak. That morning a 7^th grader he was coaching blistered a 53.5 relay leg in the Junior Olympics 4 x 400. Any fan would be thrilled with that. Multiply that by 10 when I realized he was talking about a 7^th-grade girl.

The challenge of writing about Kendall Baisden is to impress upon the reader just how good she is without snow-blowing a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately worthless predictions into her path. Let me just start out with a fact, and then we’ll get into her story.

Only one 14-year-old in the history of this planet has run 400m faster than Baisden’s 53.05. That was Jamaica’s Chris-Ann Gordon, who ran 52.68 in 2009.

Where does that kind of unearthly speed come from? According to her mother, Tina Pickett-Baisden, the first person to notice it was a tennis coach at Michigan State, when Kendall had attended a tennis camp at age 9. “She got homesick and I had to come up in the middle of the week to visit her, and her tennis coach pulled me aside and said, ‘Did you know your child is fast?’ I was not glad to hear this. I basically blew him off.”

Not that Pickett-Baisden was being rude. At the time, the family figured they maybe had a tennis prodigy on their hands. Track was the furthest thing from their minds. Says the mother of two, “As a kid she did tennis, soccer camp, basketball... People were always telling me she was great at this or that, and I was, ‘Really?… yeah, yeah…’ ”

As Kendall recalls, the tennis coach challenged her to a one-on-one race around the tennis courts. Did she win? “No, he cheated,” she says with a laugh.

In 2004, she started bringing home flyers for the track team at her school, St. Regis in Bloomfield Hills. Remembers mom, “Kendall would say, ‘Remember when that guy said that I was fast? I’d really like to try this.’ I was not into it. I thought it might help her speed for tennis, though.”

By all accounts, the program that Deanna Wile and Tom Gorman run at St. Regis is big, fun, and positive. They didn’t take long to notice her gifts, and her mother also had her eyes opened. Says Pickett-Baisden, “I had no clue whatsoever. The first time I ever saw her run, she was going against a boy in the 7^th or 8^th grade, and she was in 4^th grade. I thought, ‘She almost beat him. She can run!’ It was still hard to get used to it.”

That year, as a fourth-grader, Baisden clocked 12.96 for 100m at the Junior Olympics. The next year, she hit 12.90 and 27.11. In 2007, she won the 400 at the AAU Junior Olympics in 57.68, took 2^nd in the 100 (12.17), and added a 3^rd in the 200 at 24.89.  Not bad times for a 6^th-grader.

In seventh grade, Baisden went from precocious to dangerous. She won the AAU’s outstanding performance award with clockings of 12.15, 24.03, and 54.72. That was the meet where she blistered the 53.5 relay. She had too… someone else was leading on the anchor of the relay and Baisden ran her down. Still two years away from her first high school season, and her 200/400 times were faster than the winning times in the D1 championships that year.

In 2009, after the indoor season in which she won her second indoor state title at 200, Baisden started working out with the Motor City Track Club. That meant catching a ride to Mumford High School, a 20-25 minute drive, two or three times a week. It also meant working with a coaching staff that has produced a slew of record-holders, two of the most notable being hurdler Kenneth Ferguson and sprinter Shayla Mahan.

Last summer, the modest Baisden surprised everyone with her Junior Olympic performances. At the USATF meet, she won the 100 and 200 in PRs of 11.73 and 23.68. A week later, she clocked 53.05 at the AAU meet in Des Moines. “I didn’t believe that I was going to run that fast at all,” she says.  “I had raced the previous weekend, 4 x 4, sprints, heats and semis. I didn’t know how I was going to run.”

With that stunning mark, the 14-year-old started getting even more attention. Yet those around her report she remains well-grounded and modest, as well as very caring. Says her mother, “It was in Greensboro or Des Moines, a boy, in the midget category, was upset after his race and crying. I found out from other people that Kendall went out and consoled him. And she didn’t even tell me.”

Says Brandon Jiles, who works alongside Robert Lynch and company in the Motor City program, “We just want her to be humble and stay positive… She’s not cocky at all. Obviously as she gets older she’ll get more pressure. We’ll just encourage her to stay humble, to stay on her square, stay focused. Some people might put a kid like that on a pedestal, but it’s important to remember that she’s still a kid.”

According to mom, “Kendall hates it for people to introduce her as a star tennis player or a star runner. She’s not scared of a good race, but she doesn’t brag. She’s an A student. Academics are first. We’ve heard stories. People get hurt. She has to have a great education.”

Ultimately, Baisden hopes to be an architect. Or maybe a dentist. “No medicine like my parents,” she says. (Both mother and father are doctors.) There’s no rush; she’s still 14.

Jiles says Baisden can do the work to go to the next level: “She’s a hard worker. In practice, she’ll do whatever you ask her to do. You ask her to run a 25, and she might run a 24. She’s always going to do a little bit better than you ask. She’s very positive, never negative. You only have to tell her to do something one time, and usually she’ll get it right. She’s one of the most focused kids we’ve ever worked with.”

Baisden confesses, “I have my little slack-off moments. I take a long time to warm down after a workout.”

Now a freshman (and an A-student) at Detroit Country Day School, Baisden is planning on both running for her school’s track team and competing in tennis at the same time. She has been considered a serious tennis prospect, but now that takes a back seat to track: “She was playing USTCA tennis,” says her mother. “It’s a very demanding schedule, two hours every day.”

Pickett-Baisden continues, “She told the AD that she wanted to do both, and he said he would try to arrange it.

If anything, Baisden worries that being overextended could affect her grades: “One problem [with doubling] is keeping up with the academics and schoolwork. If I had to choose one school sport over the other, it would be hard to pick. Both teams have good chances to do really well at regionals and states, and I wouldn’t want to let my friends down.”

Will Baisden be pulled between her high school track program and her work with Motor City that’s aimed at the summer season? “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem,” says her mother. “When we applied and talked to the admissions counselor, we told them she competes at a national level. They’re used to dealing with that. Chris Webber went there. They understand her caliber. She wants to be part of the team.”

Country Day’s David Wilson, who had run the boys program before, is taking the girls under his wing this season. “It’s going to be a really different experience,” says Baisden. “He understands… He’s been very helpful. We have a good relationship already.”

Jiles clarifies the role that Coach Lynch and he will play: “Because of the caliber that she is, we’ll be hands-off, but consulting. We’re supposed to get her schedule so we can sort out where she needs to be. Her high school coaches are going to be in charge. The most important thing with the high school season is that she stays healthy.”

And as for Baisden’s bright future, no predictions here. Even the question of whether she’s a long or short sprinter is up in the air. “I had never done the 400 until 6^th grade,” she says. “I would watch others do it and think, ‘Now how do these kids run a whole lap like that?’ I really do like the 400 as much as I do the other events. I find it more rewarding in the end.”

Looking ahead, she says, “I’m hoping to get faster, and stay faster. I want to see drops in my times, and make progress. I want to compete at the world level, and make U.S. teams.” Until then, however, she’s enjoying the process. “I like being with my team. I like the races; I like the spikes and things. I like every aspect of the sport. I like how hard work pays off.”