Potomac athlete heads to New York City, from gravel track to Nike stadium

On an overcast day in early February, Potomac School's outdoor track was covered in snow. Cows and horses stood on a property nearby and the sounds of cars whooshing along Highway 200 could be heard a few miles away.

Corbin Weltzien crunched footsteps into the snow as he walked out onto the track. He started training on this track in the fifth grade and grinned as he talked about some of its more run down elements. Now a Junior at Hellgate High School in Missoula, Weltzien and five other athletes part of the Mountain West Youth Track Club - the only USA Track and Field Club in the greater Missoula area - are headed to New York City to compete in the Nike Indoor Nationals, a national track and field competition, March 8-10.

Weltzien, his mom, former principal and head coach of the Mountain West Youth Track Club see a lot of parallels in Weltzien's success and that community-supported track.

"We've got a gravel track and we've got about four super rickety old hurdles and I remember them (the fifth graders) they go out there and they just try to jump over them," Potomac School Principal Sarah Schmill said. "Just to remember where he started to where this has taken him, I think it's just really cool."

Weltzien started with the Mountain West Youth Track Club in eighth grade and has done one other national competition with the club. Eighth grade was when Weltzien started hurdling specifically and he said it started out as a joke amongst his friends. Hurdling was considered a scary event, Weltzien said.

"I wanted to stay active so I joined them (Mountain West) ... It's kind of turned into a whole team," Weltzien said. "We're a community ... It kind of just unlocked my passion for the sport."

Diane Cummins, head coach of Mountain West Youth Track Club, said only a small percentage of the club's athletes make it to this level of competition. She has asked herself what made this group different and some of the reasons she came up with are that the athletes have a history on the team, are passionate, smart, dedicated and come from great families.

The track club operates like a mini-Olympics. Often, the athletes in the club have competed against each other in high school events since the members represent all four high schools - including Loyola Sacred Heart High School - in Missoula. But they come together in the club as teammates and are exposed to athletes from different states and at different ability levels than they're used to in Montana.

Qualifying for Nike Nationals is an exceptionally high standard, Cummins said. As a comparison, for national-ranking events in the summer, athletes have to place in the top eight of their event to qualify. But for Nike, there was a cut off. Weltzien, for example, had to run the 60 meter hurdles in 8.43 seconds to qualify. He did so in 8.39.

"I was ecstatic and same with my buddies. Our coach told us and we all were just out of our minds. We had no idea that was going to happen," Weltzien said, reflecting on getting the news about Nike.

Weltzien's class of 20 at the kindergarten through eighth grade Potomac School was one of the largest. Weltzien's mom, Alicia Vanderheiden, said that was one of the driving forces behind getting the track spruced up.

The track was used as a softball field initially and was maintained by volunteers. As those volunteers got busy with other things, Vanderheiden said, the track became weedy and unusable. Vanderheiden said the science teacher used it to test the distribution of weevils needed to manage knapweed.

A new group of volunteers came together to tackle the track in 2012, when Weltzien and his class of 20 started kindergarten.

"I had a vested interest. I was a single parent and at the same time, something that was happening at the school was that they went to a four-day school week," Vanderheiden said.

Without daycare on that fifth day and working a full-time job with the City of Missoula, Vanderheiden felt that if she didn't have something for Weltzien to do outside of school, she'd have to move him to a different school district so she could work. Potomac School ended up with a three-year grant to fund activities on that fifth day, and many groups used the track in the summer for these activities.

Vanderheiden and other volunteers wrote grants and received funding from various local organizations, and an engineer donated services to help grade the field and figure out logistics. Funding also enabled a well to be drilled that irrigates the now grassy track in the springs and summers. For now, the well is just used for irrigation, but Vanderheiden said the intent is that it can be a backup for Potomac School or the community center if ever needed.

That irrigation was key, Vanderheiden said, as it tackled one of the biggest issues of a grassy track - someone has to go out there and water it.

"It's easy to burn out volunteers because your volunteers are your firefighters, your EMTs. They're also trying to maintain this amazing community center that was built. They're the PTC and the Food Bank," Vanderheiden said.

Vanderheiden will be joining Weltzien in New York City. She said she couldn't miss the "big eye-edness" of her son experiencing New York for the first time. She is proud of how Weltzien dedicates so much of himself to hurdling and athletics, but also to his academics. He's maintained a 4.0 and has Stanford on the top of his college list.

For Weltizen, academics and athletics have intertwined in formative ways. He takes lessons he's learned from running and hurdling and applies them to life more generally.

"You're always going to have a bad day," Weltzien said. "You can't always run your best time every time ... you're always going to have lows, but just keep with it."

If interested in supporting Mountain West Youth Track Club, visit their GoFundMe page here or at https://www.gofundme.com/f/from-big-sky-to-the-big-apple-help-our-athletes.

If you would like to send a check for support, write to Mountain West Youth Track Club PO Box 2428 Missoula MT, 59806. Questions can be sent to Diane Cummins at diane.cummins@olympian.org