Rachael Uvieghara

Palm Harbor University, Dunedin, FL, c/o 2024
AthleticNET Bio

Rachel Uvieghara wasn’t allowed to participate in sports when she was younger. Her parents were worried she would injure herself. Her parents, Alero(her mom) and Godwin(her dad) have been a strong influence in her life as you will learn as you read on.

“When I made it to middle school, they started letting me just do stuff for fun after school because they didn't want to me home just doing nothing.”

Given the green light to play sports in the sixth grade, she chose to play basketball. At one of her games, her mother noticed how well she played and that she had speed telling her “ Man, you actually have a lot of speed!” A former track runner, she was inspired and advised Rachael to start training.

“The next day, she made me start running around the neighborhood to have better endurance and then she's just been on me to have that mentality that does not stop working; just to have that drive to keep going at it, regardless of a win or a loss.”

In the seventh grade, Rachael picked up track and field. After one of her races, a reporter came up to her. The always quotable Rachael retells the story.

“I ran 12.07 in tennis shoes in middle school. I don't know how I did that. It was crazy because there was one interviewer who came up to me like  it was crazy that I ran that time because so many high schoolers are killing themselves to run a time like that in spikes and you just did it in tennis shoes. It was my beat up Skechers. I don’t know how I did that.”

Her principal posted the news of her school record time in the daily newsletter the next day. That drew the attention of private schools in the area and they began recruiting her to come to their high school. But COVID struck, and she decided to attend Palm Harbor University for the medical program they offered.

Rachael is quite studious and the COVID left her with time at home. That summer, she decided to read 500 books since she had all this free time and as a response to her dad's doubts she had about her.

“The whole thing was just a rebuttal against my dad because he thought I could not read. So I was like, you know what? I have all the time in the world this summer because we're not going back to school due to the whole COVID thing so let me just do it and  just read as many books as I can. I just got into the rhythm of reading, and then it just became more and more fun.”

She is now on book 464 and hopes to finish before the end of this year so she can focus on track. Her list of books includes fantasy, mystery and any book that captures her mood at the time. One of her favorite books was “Rules for Vanishing” by Kate Alice Marshall. 

“That book was crazy. I couldn't understand the ending because the author won't come out with a second book. She just wants it to be that ending. And I'm so mad because the book just takes you through a whole process of a sister trying to find her sister who decided to go on this road. And the whole book is called rules for vanishing because as people go down this road and decide to follow the rules of the road they vanish in the end. And then I was so  mad because the friends dies. It was pissing me off because if I'm gonna do all this sacrifice, all for you to just die? Oh, God, I was so mad. I was also pissed because my favorite character died. And I didn’t even like the main character! I just needed to finish the book to see if this was real. It was just crazy, but  I'd recommend that book to anyone.” 

Also during COVID, she took up knitting. She taught herself to knit and knitted scarf after scarf with the blue yarn she had around the house and ordered from Amazon.

“I like knitting because you have to be patient. I like having them tell you what happens in the end is better than the beginning. You have to have that patient mentality.”

On the track, she is known for wearing goggles and at 5-09 and being so fast she is hard not to notice. 

She started wearing goggles in the seventh grade when her glasses kept falling off her nose. Her optometrist at LensCrafter recommended goggles. She has worn the same pair since. Initially, she was embarrassed because of the way she looked. Then she wrote an entire paper on Kareem Abdul Jabar for school. She came away with a different outlook on her goggles after that.

“I was like, you know what? if he can compete in goggles, and he's doing amazing, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna be just like him, because he was the one that was able to put it on the map and show people off saying that, yeah, I can work on this and be a good basketball player. So I said to myself, I'm just going to do that with goggles and sports in general. Then it just stopped being a problem wearing goggles and then it just took off. I did not know goggles were that big.”

Currently, she is expecting a new pair from Nike that will be gold so she’ll have to retire her old ones which are worn and beaten.

She doesn’t like to lose and she didn’t for a while. Her first defeat was not welcomed. She went from thinking she was ok at running to practicing hard the following day to never be beaten again by that girl. That girl happened to be Kylah Buckle of North Port who is now at Tennessee.

At regionals, she invited her mother who had never seen her run since middle school because the meets she did go to, she was volunteering at. She fills in the rest of the story.

“So I wanted my mom to come to this meet because I was like, mom, I'm going to murder this meet. And she said ‘Are you serious?’ The milesplit guy was talking me up so big. I had just won the 100 but I was really scared about the two because the girl who beat me was in the lane ahead of me. I knew if I didn't beat her out the blocks she would murder me on the curve. I told my mom, ‘ I can't lose to this girl again!’ She said I needed to stay calm.

The moment the gun goes off, I run so hard like I was gonna get shot. I finished the race and the announcer said ‘Oh my God, a freshmen just broke the meet record with a 24.13!’ And I was like ‘oh I didn't even know it was that good of a time.’ After the race, I saw the girl. She was actually really nice. She was a junior and I was a freshman. I don’t know where she is now, but she was so nice. She made me really get obsessed with running because I did not want to experience that again.”

 At state, she finished third in the 100m (12.14, -1.3) and fourth in the 200m(24.42, -0.6), the best by a freshman in Florida’s largest school classification.

After her freshman year, she says “ her mom was on me everyday. We were working non stop because I shouldn’t have lost. She’s so analytical when it comes to track and she knows how I run.”

She and her mom noticed that in the 200 meter race at state, she had the lead coming out of the curve, but then slowed down and everyone caught her. She went to work and targeted her start and working on her stamina.

“I need to work on getting all my blocks because that had been my issue. And it still is an issue. But I got better at mediating that. After that season I had to work out harder because I knew I was a better athlete, but I just didn't have the technique down. That was the whole issue.”

Her private coach, Jamar Parker, worked with her on her technique. She and her mom worked on her speed endurance. The aim was to make her stronger over the final parts of the race and to face the pain head on.

“My mom  was just making me do 400 repeats because she knew I needed to be tolerant of the pain. She wanted me to get used to that. So when it came to the big meets, I wouldn't be shying away from that. I'd be able to attack it head on.”

Her sophomore year she improved again. This time she was runner up to Jassani Carter[ Now at USC] in both the 100m (1.64,+1.1) and the 200m (23.98, 0.2).  Not entirely pleased with losing again, she vowed to beat Carter’s times the following season. In practice she has a tenacious mindset, always striving to improve. She values practice because in the end it will pay dividends in races.

“When it comes to practice, you have to be able to push yourself so when it comes to the big meets, it's just fun. I think about every aspect of my races that I know, my mindset is going to be a big tier of which event I put more energy into.”

Her junior season she added the 400. She runs 52-53 range in practice, but at the state meet she finished 14th in 57.21. The college coaches who are recruiting noticed that she was “jogging” in that 400. In fact,  she was a bit. 

After winning the 100 meters in 11.38(0.5), the 400 was next. She loves the 200m which falls approximately ten minutes after the 400m so she saved herself for that event. The strategy worked as she blazed to another personal best of 23.22 for another win. The two performances were better than Carter’s HS best were 11.53 and 23.43 as she had vowed to herself to do a year earlier.

Her final season, she is aiming high. She wants to run under 22 for the 200m. In the 400m, her mom thinks she should run 49. She’s not sure about the 100m because of her start. She tends to fall down at the start. She’s been advised to begin lifting some weights to get stronger. It’s only weight bearing exercises to this point. She loves the challenge and again, she strives to do the unthinkable to some, realistic to her and her mom.

“I feel like I can accomplish it. If you have that mindset of belief, and you have that identity to not slow down when you feel like you're not there or you have that give up mentality, you need to be able to just focus on your own goals. It's better to have goals than to not have any at all, because if I don't achieve them, at least I tried. That’s how I think.”

College wise, she’s getting a lot of interest which she doesn’t care to divulge at this time. Coaches she has spoken to have compared her form to Olympian Allyson Felix, but she thinks of herself as running like Florence Griffith Joyner  (“FloJo”). She learned that in middle school after watching videos.

“In middle school, I didn't really have a good track coach so I watched  videos on how athletes would run. I liked watching Flo Jo run because she would run so tall and she'd made sure that her posture was straight forward. She wasn't leaning forward, she was always straight. I always made sure that I would run really straight, so then my legs would just carry. So a lot of coaches have said that I have that straight up posture naturally and it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of athletes. So that's how I think I run with strength posture, but my mom thinks it is broken, but I don’t know.”

She’s also interested in a college where she could pursue  a degree in molecular biology/public health with an eye on a career in anesthesiology. She completed the biotechnician assistant certification this past year.

It’s hard not to root for Rachael. She is so passionate about everything in her life and everything seems to work in her favor.

Her mother has been telling her that she would be “signed” by Nike for the longest time which she thought was “crazy.” Her family had been thinking of going to USATF U20 this past season, but the expenses were too much to travel so she decided not to go. Her father said, “ If they wanted you to compete then they’d pay everything for you to go. Everything.”  The following day she received the phone call inviting her to become part of the Nike Elite program and that her expenses would be covered to attend the USATF U20 meet next summer.

But most of all, it is her outlook on life that is so inspiring. And it happens that the quote came from an unknown author on Pinterest of all places.

“I have a quote I live by. And it's there's two R's in life, reward and regret. Every day, you strive for rewards, but at the end of the day, if you don't strive for a reward, you're gonna live a life of regret. So I like to think like that.”