Isabella Whittaker is one of the fastest women in college without a scholarship
Division 1 track and field does not get on television much, but when it does there are only a few events that you should expect to see. The NCAA championships are televised on ESPN and thanks to their app you can even watch the prelims if you really want to that badly. But unless you have an active subscription, and a lot of time on your hands, you’re likely not going to see anything from almost any other conference in D1. There are 30 conferences in total but the only one that still doesn’t hand out athletic scholarships to any of their athletes is the Ivy League. As a result most people didn’t notice when Isabella Whittaker ran 51.69 indoors in the 400 meter dash. That makes her one of the 10 fastest women in the nation in that event, in addition to the collegiate leader in the 500 meter!
Isabella is now a legitimate threat at the NCAA championship meet while competing for the University of Pennsylvania, which is best known for hosting the Penn relays, but not for winning anything in the meet itself. The only reason fans might think she was never supposed to be this fast, is because of the uniform she’s been wearing for her entire college career. But if she can keep this up, she can not only contend for an NCAA championship medal but also get on national tv to actually watch her compete.
How good was Isabella Whittaker in high school?
Isabella Whittaker spent her entire collegiate career at the University of Pennsylvania. However, she is just one of two women in the NCAA who are dominating right now with the same last name. Juliette Whittaker is her sister, who competes for Stanford University, and finished as the runner up in the 800 meter run at the NCAA indoor meet in 2023, as a freshman. She was also the Gatorade track athlete of the year while she was in high school, which definitely puts that performance in to perspective. But Isabella is her older sister, and paved the way for Juliette by dominating in her own right. At the high school level Isabella would have rated as a 4 star recruit on SCArecruiting.com at the end of her junior year. Her senior year was actually in 2020 so we’ll never really know how good she would have been at the end of it all. Her range in the 200, 400, and 800 did earn her state track athlete of the year status in Maryland, and likely could have wrote her ticket to many D1 programs on scholarship. But she chose the University of Pennsylvania in the Ivy League instead, where evidently she didn’t need a scholarship to attend.
The reason why the Ivy League doesn’t give athletic scholarships out is because they don’t need to. They have so much financial aid money to offer that if Isabella or any other athlete for that matter really did need some, they should get more than enough. But Isabella choosing UPenn is a very big deal because as solid as they are in track, they don’t get 4 star recruits on a regular. The Penn Quakers are known as the team that hosts Penn Relays for track but that’s about it. They compete to win the Ivy league, and did it outdoors in 2022. But they have never scored a point in the NCAA championship meet the entire time Isabella has been on the roster, up until now.
Isabella Whittaker’s rise as an NCAA championship contender
When Isabella Whittaker got to Penn she made her presence felt immediately. As a freshman she qualified for the NCAA championship meet in the outdoor 400 meter dash! Of course nobody really noticed because she didn’t make the final, but the point is that she was already there out the gate. From then until now you could argue that she underachieved if you really want to. She won the Ivy league in the 400 as a sophomore outdoors, but failed to get back to the NCAA outdoor meet. As a junior in 2023 she didn’t win the 400 at all, indoors or outdoors. Which is proof that the Ivy league really is a competitive confernece! She then barely missed out on the NCAA outdoor meet again, but this time helped Penn get in for the 4x400 meter relay. I would argue that qualifying a relay for an NCAA championship meet is even more impressive than having an individual runner get in, because that means that the Penn Quakers with all their non-scholarship runners, were one of the best collections of talent in the nation for that event.
After all that Isabella Whittaker ran the nation’s fastest 500 meter time this season. It was honestly validation of the athlete she’s already proven to be even though the 500 is not an NCAA championship event. If that wasn’t enough she ran a legitimate PR indoors in the 400 meter dash to put her name inside the top 10. That also gives her a chance to show up to the NCAAs again and put UPenn on the board, for the first time in years.
The Bottom Line
It is unclear what the future of Isabella Whittaker’s career will look like. But it is clear that she belongs running with the best. Isabella dominated her state, in several events. So much so that her sister was able to follow that blueprint and become the best track athlete in the nation. She then proved to be one of the nation’s top 400 meter runners immediately as a freshman, for a school that quite frankly doesn’t show up to NCAA competitions much at all. And now she is proving that was not a fluke, and that she has what it takes to put the Quakers on the national leaderboard, contending for a championship medal. Everyone loves an underdog, and the University of Pennsylvania definitely qualifies as such, even if Isabella Whittaker “technically” is not one herself.
LOOK GOOD, FEEL GOOD, RUN GOOD.
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