ORO VALLEY — Jett Merrill has made it to the Arizona state track and field championships every year since his freshman season.
The Ironwood Ridge junior is now chasing back-to-back gold in the hurdles, but his journey began long before his first high school race.
“I like to tell people that he was hurdling before he even in the womb,” said his mom, Brittany Merrill, an assistant track coach at Ironwood Ridge and four-time state champion herself. “I was pregnant and I was coaching hurdles at the time.”
His father is a three-time state champion, so running — and winning — are in the family DNA.
Jett tried other sports growing up, but hurdles came naturally. Even as a nervous freshman, Brittany recalls, he was beating seniors in preseason workouts.
Ironwood Ridge head coach Michael Smith remembers exactly when he realized what the team had.
“The first practice that we had his freshman year…I knew that he was special. Just how quickly he was picking up things, how coachable he was and how fast he was moving through the hurdles,” Smith said. “Probably the first hurdle workout, I was like...OK, this boy can run.”
For Jett, the mindset is simple.
“I’m just gonna go run fast,” he said. “That’s just kind of my motto: Lightning McQueen, run fast, turn left.”
That mindset helped him in one of the defining moments of his career. At last year’s divisionals, he fell at the final hurdle.
“He fell at the last hurdle and like tuck-and-rolled and still got up and still won,” Smith said. “It was pretty traumatic… but he’d done so much work throughout the race that he could still finish first.”
This year, Merrill has been even faster, shattering personal and program bests.
He clocked a blistering 10.69 seconds in the 100 meters at the Levi Wallace Foundation Tucson Invitational in March, a mark that made him one of the state’s fastest sprinters.
In the 110-meter hurdles, he posted a season-best 14.00 seconds at the Nighthawk Early Bird Invitational, earning him the top rank in all of Arizona.
Merrill also soared to 23 feet, 9 inches in the long jump at the Nighthawk Invitational in April; his farthest leap yet.
At state, Merrill will take on a brutal schedule: high hurdles, 100 meters, and long jump in less than an hour, followed later by the 300 hurdles.
“It’s going to be really hot,” Smith said. “But he’s prepared, he’s put in the work… he’ll be ready to go this weekend for sure.”
Through it all, Merrill says the key is not overthinking it.
“I’m grateful to have teammates that always are there to push me and help me back up whenever I need it,” he said. “It’s fun to have teammates that push each other… that’s what makes this sport so much fun.”
From hurdling before he could walk to chasing multiple medals on the state’s biggest stage, Jett Merrill is built for speed and for the moment.
