Maybe There Is an “I” in “Team”?

High school track meets in the United States often feature hundreds of kids competing in a dozen events, sometimes over multiple days. It’s not hard to imagine why, either — you often have a few dozen schools, each with sprinters, distance runners, long jumpers, pole vaulters, javelineers, discus throwers, and the like. And even though most of the events are individual competitions (relay races are the big exception), track meets are a team sport — individuals who do well in their competitions earn points for their schools, and the school with the most points wins the meet. So if you’re super-fast but your teammates aren’t, your school probably isn’t winning a championship.

Probably… but not definitely.

Rochelle High School in Rochelle, Texas, isn’t known for its superlative sports teams. Despite being in Texas, where football may fairly be described as a religion, Rochelle doesn’t have a regular football team — the Rochelle Hornets compete in a modified version of the sport called “six-man football.” That’s because Rochelle High only has about 160 students enrolled, making it one of the smallest schools in the state. That shouldn’t be a surprise, because Rochelle, Texas, isn’t even big enough to be a town. It’s an unincorporated community in the middle of the state, not particularly close to any of Texas’s major cities. (Here’s a map.) It’s home to fewer than 200 people, a post office, the high school, and not much else. And it can’t support the high school alone; the Rochelle Independent School District covers the immediate community and many neighboring ones as well.

And in 2008, that area included a teenager named Bonnie Richardson. Richardson was one of the few members of the Rochelle Hornets track team, and that shouldn’t be a surprise, because even the word “track” could only be used loosely when describing Rochelle High. As Sports Illustrated would later report, the school’s actual running track was “made of dirt, grass, weeds, rocks, red-ant mounds and ruts from Friday nights when the pickups pull up and fans watch from lawn chairs in the truck beds with their headlights crisscrossing the field as the Hornets play six-man football. Her track has no lanes or borders, blurs into the football field and has puddles at one end that force her to cut into the end zone, a trench from an old water line that she must hurdle, goats and a llama grazing beside it, armadillos and deer pattering across it.” Hardly Olympic — or even upscale suburb — level quality.

And yet, it was good enough for her to do something rarely done. As a junior, she represented Rochelle in the state’s Division 1A championships, a group at the time comprising about 400 of the smallest public high schools in the state. (Texas has six divisions, each with roughly the same number of member schools; in 2008, 1A schools had fewer than 200 students enrolled.) And she did so alone. As ESPN reported, she was the only student from Rochelle to qualify for any event held at the state championships — and she qualified for almost all of them. On the first day, in 90 degree heat, she competed in the high jump, long jump, and discus. On the second day, she ran in both the 100m and 200m sprints. She didn’t qualify in the two relay races, which makes sense, given that she didn’t have three teammates to run with her.

Richardson won the high jump and the 200m. She came in second in the long jump and 100m dash. In the discus, she placed third. In total, she earned 42 points for Rochelle High — more than enough to secure the state team title for her school. The announcement came over the loudspeaker, much to Richardson’s surprise, as SI reported:

“We’re just going to wait a little longer,” says [her coach, Jym] Dennis. He knows she’ll hate the hoo-ha that’s about to occur. “We’re waiting for something,” he waffles.

“C’mon, I want to go,” she insists.

“You’re doing pretty well in the team standings,” he soft-soaps. “We need to hang around a little longer.”

“Funny, funny, ha. Whatever.” She has watched other schools arrive with two busloads of athletes. She has never, as a member of a track squad of three, even considered track a team sport.

“Rochelle, Seymour and Chilton, please report to the award stand!” the P.A. man booms after the 1,600-meter relay. Coach Dennis can’t help himself: He laughs.

“What?” she demands.

“I think you just won the whole meet.”

She blinks. “Are you kidding?“

Rochelle Hornets, despite sending only one athlete to the competition, were state champions.

And for good measure, Richardson did the same thing in 2009. ESPN covered that event, too, reporting that “Richardson won four individual medals in five events: gold in the long jump and high jump, silver in the discus and bronze in the 200 meters. She also finished fourth in the 100 meters.” The state title was still in question for when the relay races were held on the afternoon of the second day; another school could have won had they finished 5th or better in the final race (or tied for first with a 6th place finish), but they came in 7th.

Richardson isn’t the only athlete to win a Texas state track title by herself — two boys did so in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively — but neither of them were repeat champs, so Richardson stands alone. She ultimately attended Texas A&M and was on the track and field team there, but didn’t find as much success, pivoting to rugby. As of 2019, she was a semi-pro player for the Houston Athletic Rugby Club, taking team MVP honors in 2014.

onus fact: Another way to win a track meet is to be the only person not disqualified — maybe. In the 1988 Olympic Games, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson won the men’s 100m dash but was quickly disqualified after failing a drug test. Years later, the top three remaining finishers would also fail drug tests (although by today’s standards, they wouldn’t have; the amount of stimulants detected in their samples were within acceptable ranges). The original 5th-place finisher, Calvin Smith, would ultimately get awarded a bronze medal, but he wasn’t too happy about it. He would later tell the press that “I should have been the gold medallist. During the last five years of my career I knew I was being denied the chance to show I was the best clean runner.”

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