The indoor track and field season is well underway, and by now almost any athlete who plans on showing up to the NCAA championship meet has put down at least one race. In 2023 Julien Alfred dominated that event, breaking her own collegiate record over and over again before becoming a World Championship finalist in the 100 meter dash. But right now tied for the fastest woman in all of college is Alyssa Colbert of Texas Tech University.

If you don’t recognize Alyssa there’s a reason, because she just arrived at Texas Tech this season. But she is not a freshman, she’s actually far from it as a junior who dropped in to Lubbock, Texas via the transfer portal. She is not the favorite to win anything at the NCAA championships yet. And there is a reason why she wasn’t originally recruited to Texas Tech out of high school. However, if she can keep this up, she can not only do damage at the NCAA championship meet but embarrass every high level program who passed up on her, not once but twice. 

How good was Alyssa Colbert in high school?

Alyssa Colbert has been in Division 1 for a while now even if people have not taken notice. She  transferred to Texas Tech from Northern Arizona University, and there is a reason why she ended up there and not in the Big 12 or any of the other super conferences to start her career. At the high school level Alyssa Colbert would have rated as a 3 star recruit on SCArecruiting.com as a freshman. That is actually really good. But she didn’t improve a whole lot on the clock after that. She never won an individual state championship in Arizona. As a senior she did run legit PRs to become a high 3 star recruit, but big name programs like the Arizona Wildcats likely didn’t want to recruit her. So she chose Northern Arizona University in the Big Sky conference to continue her track career.

Interestingly enough the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks are actually one of the best track and field programs in all of D1. But the reason for that is because their distance program is perhaps the most dominant cross country team on the men’s and women’s sides combined in the past decade. Their women lost the NCAA championship to Katelyn Tuohy and NC State in cross country this past season by literally 1 point! They run away with their conference title on the track almost every year now as well, but remember their distance program is the real reason for that. So if you aren’t going to end up at a power conference program, Northern Arizona was just about the best choice Alyssa could have made.

Alyssa Colbert’s rise to the top of NCAA sprinting

The moment she got to college she proved all the top schools wrong. She ran 7.32 seconds in the 60 out the gate and actually won the conference championship indoors in the 60 meter and 200 meter dashes as a freshman. That’s hard to do, regardless of what conference you are in. She then followed it up sweeping the sprints again outdoors in the 100 and 200 meter dashes. She didn’t qualify out of the NCAA west regional meet, but in one season a 3 star recruit had already proven that a lot of schools messed up when they ignored her.

So it should be no surprise that as a sophomore she did what she does. She swept the sprints indoors, and won the Big Sky 100 meter dash outdoors. The only thing that was a surprise is that she ended up losing to her teammate in the 200 meter dash final. She made it back to the regional meet, and this time took care of business to book her tickets to the NCAAs. There she lost to her future teammate Rosemary Chukwuma of Texas Tech in the prelims.

For the 2024 season Alyssa Colbert clearly never returned to Northern Arizona. She entered the transfer portal, and when the dust settled she had become a Red Raider. So when she went out in her first meet of the 2024 season and ran 7.19 seconds which would be the collegiate leading time right now “if it wasn’t for the altitude”, it became official. Alyssa Colbert is not only one of the fastest women in college right now, but a threat to win in any meet she enters from here on out.

The Bottom Line 

It is unclear what the future will be for Alyssa Colbert’s career. All we can review are the receipts for everything she has done to this point. Alyssa Colbert is a sprinter who came to high school ready to dominate, and honestly underachieved for what was left of that career. She was likely overlooked as a recruit as a result, but ended up in one of the best landing spots any recruit in her position could. She then ran the table, practically sweeping the sprints for 2 straight years indoors and outdoors in the Big Sky! She is proof that recruitment rankings clearly don’t mean that much after the gun goes off. And the transfer portal gave every school a chance to make up for passing up on her the first time. But she chose Texas Tech. So now everyone knows that she belongs not only in their uniform, but in the national championship conversation.

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