How did Graham Blanks win an NCAA Championship without a scholarship?
The indoor track and field season is finally underway heading into 2024. Normally nothing that important actually happens in the month of December. But the kids in college this year never got the memo. The ladies of the track dominated the headlines through the entire cross country season. With Parker Valby emerging victorious in her rematch with Katelyn Tuohy. But while Katelyn was turning pro Parker continued to snatch the spotlight breaking the collegiate record in the indoor 5K.
If you were paying very close attention there was another compelling storyline on the men’s side. Graham Blanks won the individual NCAA championship in cross country. It’s a big deal on its own. Especially when you consider that he runs for Harvard University in the Ivy League. But he followed that up by doing exactly what Parker Valby did. He broke the collegiate record for the indoor 5K during his first race of the season, to make it clear that nobody can beat him going forward, if he is on top of his game. Graham Blanks as a Harvard athlete competes for a school that doesn’t offer any athletic scholarship. So he’s not just smarter than you, and for that matter faster. But he’s also proof that every other school in the nation placed their scholarship bets with the wrong men.
The truth is that Graham Blanks is a distance running superstar who was never really supposed to be this good. You could argue that Katelyn Tuohy wrote the blueprint to become NCAA royalty in the modern era. If that’s true, then Graham Blanks must have studied it incredibly well. So well in fact that he is now the king of the track, even without an athletic scholarship.
How good was Graham Blanks in high school?
Graham Blanks might seem like he just came out of nowhere, but that is not accurate. At the high school level his senior year season happened in 2020. So he basically had no outdoor races to run that year, leaving a big question mark on how good he really was. However as a junior he did win a State Championship in Georgia competing in the 3200 meter. His 800 meter was pedestrian, for anyone headed to D1 but his mile times were second team national elite level on MileSplit. It should have been clear to anyone paying attention, that high school track didn’t really have an event that was long enough for him run at his absolute best. But fortunately for Graham, college track and field definitely does. So he committed to Harvard because he’s smart enough to do that and hasn’t looked back ever since.
How good is Harvard Track and Field?
In all likelihood Graham wasn’t hotly recruited by any team in the ACC or the SEC. But that’s their loss because Harvard University Track and Field is one of the best kept secrets in Division 1. Harvard has been so good for so long now, that they basically rank number 1 in the northeast region for D1 almost all the time in both indoor and outdoor track. That is on both the men’s and women’s sides. This is the same region with UConn and Syracuse in it. Before Graham Blanks won the individual title in NCAA cross country, Maia Ramsden had just won the NCAA outdoor title in the 1500 meter. Several years before that Gabby Thomas did it indoors in the 200 meter dash, before going on to win medals on the world stage. Harvard does track and field, incredibly well without any athletic scholarships to build their nationally ranked team.
The Ivy League is the only conference that imposes a ban on athletic scholarships in all of Division 1. The reason is because they don’t need to. All of their schools have billions of dollars in endowment, that give out basically as much financial aid as any student could ever need, regardless of whether or not you play a sport. If your family has money, the education isn’t free. But simply put, they don’t give out athletic scholarships, because they don’t need to. The only problem that comes up for anyone getting recruited by their teams, is that you have to be smart enough to get into a school like Harvard in the first place.
Graham Blanks rise to NCAA champion
Graham Blanks was clearly smart enough, and we’re finding out that he’s fast enough to dominate the NCAA as well. From the moment he got to Harvard he’s proven that he belongs with the best in D1. As a freshman he went All American at the NCAA Cross Country championships. He later won the IC4A championship in the 5K. He then went 6th overall at the NCAA championships as a sophomore in cross country. By the time the Outdoor season was done, he went second overall in the NCAA 5K. By that point every distance runner in the nation knew that Graham Blanks of Harvard was legit. But nobody could have expected what he’s done from then until now.
Since the outdoor NCAA meet in 2023, Graham Blanks has never lost a race. That includes winning the Nuttycombe Cross Country Invitational, just like Parker Valby did. That race is basically a pre-national meet anyway. So when he came back to the NCAA meet and won the cross country title, all he really did was beat all of the nation’s best runners, again in order to prove the point. So when Graham stepped on the line to open his indoor season 2 weeks later, he was already the favorite to win. He just wasn’t supposed to do it in record breaking time, which he did.
So at this point, Graham Blanks is the king of the distance events in college. Nobody has figured out how to beat him since June of 2023. In fact, nobody in history has figured out how to run faster through 5 thousand meters indoors. He’s on pace to complete the 3k and 5K double at the NCAA indoor championships, and he’s obviously the favorite now in both of them. The transfer portal is a thing, and scholarship slots do exist. If Graham wanted to, he could write his ticket literally anywhere else in the country. But he clearly doesn’t need a scholarship, and a chance to attend Harvard is just about as good a deal as anyone else is going to find. So for now the joke appears to be on everyone else in the NCAA. Because if you are recruiting distance runners, and you gave them scholarship money. Then you are now paying for them, to lose to a man who doesn’t even have one at all.
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