03/18/26 Nerdsletter
- jayslagle
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Contributor: The Nerd
Welcome to our first Nerdsletter of the track season. For those of you who are new to the Nerd world, we'll do our best to publish a Nerdsletter every Tuesday or Wednesday through the end of the Nebraska high school track season. However, this endeavor is just a hobby for the forty or so folks who proudly wear the Nerd name, so don't think badly of us if we miss a week or two.
Grit to gold
We're thrilled to announced that Alex Madsen, aka Irish Nerd, just published his first article for us at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/post/kaser. Alex is a senior distance runner at Falls City Sacred Heart who has sit out his final track season due to injury, so he's doing the next best thing by writing about running. His first article is about Doniphan-Trumbull's Kaser Johnson, who captured the Class D State cross country title last October. We hope you enjoy his article as much as we did.
Collegiate National qualifiers
The collegiate indoor T&F national championships have wrapped up and there are an incredible number of All Americans either from Nebraska or competing for Nebraska colleges. Several weeks ago we posted a list of all of the Nationals qualifiers - qualifying is a huge accomplishment - and now we've updated it for results. The list at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/post/indoor26q includes these National Champions:
Adrianna Rodencal, SR, Concordia (Lincoln Lutheran) - 60-meter hurdles
The Doane 4x400 team of Kat Vogt (Pierce), Jayden Meyer (Syracuse), Kiley Hejtmanek (Maywood-Hayes Center) and Tania Gleason (Fremont)
Imani Skanes, FR, College of St. Mary (Omaha Northwest) - long jump - CSM's first national champion in any sport
Axelina Johannson, SR, UNL (Sweden) - shot put
Congratulations to all of the athletes who qualified for the Nationals meets.
High school indoor marks
If you've been living under a rock, you might not realize that Nebraska colleges provide a plethora of opportunities for high school athletes to compete in indoor T&F meets before the official NSAA season begins in late February. With the winter season officially wrapped up, we've prepared a list of the top performances from the winter at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/post/winter2026. While only a small percentage of high school athletes compete in these meets, the results do give us a glimpse of who may excel this season.
Performance list
On a similar note, our 'thing' each spring is to maintain a performance list by event and Class. We scrape data from athletic.net but we also manually input performances that don't make the internet. Assisted by GINW grad Emma Smith (a computer science major at Northwestern), Nerd Junior will release the first version of the spreadsheet around April 15 once he has enough data to fill out the top 15 results for each event. We'll update the spreadsheet several times each week.
Meet schedule and results
One of the challenges for the performance list is to find meet results that don't make the internet. Well, we do that too. Each weekend we ask our followers to help us build the Nebraska T&F schedule for the following week, and then we track down those results to post at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/trackresults. If we're on the ball, that link will also indicate whether a Nerd is schedule to shoot your meet.
What exactly our Nerds?
Our patron saint, Robert Carradine of 'Revenge of the Nerds' fame, passed away on February 23. We carry on our Nerdly duties in his honor.
As a refresher, the Nerd team consists of forty or so volunteer photographers who take pictures and then post them for free on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/PrepRunningNerd/photos_albums. If you're not following our Facebook page - or our X account at https://x.com/PrepRunningNerd - you'll miss out on more timely posts about impressive performances, cool pics and stupid ramblings. It generally takes the Nerds 3-7 days to cull down the 1000+ pictures they take into a presentable 100-300 pictures that are uploaded. If you DM us to ask when photos will be posted, there's a good chance we'll tell you that they'll be ready sometime in the next year. All of our Nerds either have jobs or attend school so they don't have Nerd deadlines.
Track meets are more difficult to shoot than cross country meets. In most meets there are at least three field events happening simultaneously early in the meet, and some field events trickle into the running portion of the meet. Since we typically have just one Nerd at each meet, there is no way we can capture all of the events or all of the athletes. The guidance I give our Nerds is that 'any picture you take is one more than we'd have if Nerds didn't exist' - and it would truly be sad if Nerds didn't exist.
If you're wondering who our Nerds are or where they're based, you can find a complete listing at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/about. This spring we've added two new Nerds - Morgan Smith (Nap Nerd), a Doane athlete, and Kristin Yale (Blurry Nerd), a Hemingford parent.
College commitment list
We're big fans of T&F athletes who choose to compete in college, and Nebraska has options ranging from junior college to Division 1. Our website has excellent guidance on the decision to compete in college at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/_files/ugd/524de1_c645787e068443ea922250d068571e93.pdf - I know it's excellent because I wrote it - and there's no time like the present to begin thinking about college. Keep in mind, we're not promising fame and fortune if you choose this path, but competing in college is an excellent way to be part of a team, surround yourself with other folks pursuing a healthy lifestyle, and maintain a level of external discipline that is often helpful for those experiencing freedom of choice for the first time.
In order to encourage collegiate athletes, we maintain a list of commitments by XC and T&F athletes at https://www.preprunningnerd.com/post/2026commit. If we've missed your favorite athlete on that list, please shoot us a DM or email us at jayslagle@hotmail.com so we can update the list.
College, high school, junior high?
While our initial focus was on Nebraska high school athletes, we've expanded our coverage to collegiate and junior high meets. If you're at a NAIA meet, there's a good chance you'll see at least one Nerd there because we have a high number of Nerd children competing in those meets. In addition, we'll occasionally shoot junior high and USATF meets if it works out for our schedules. By the end of the season, we'll probably have shot over 100 track meets.
We'll also shine a light on outstanding junior high performances with our 'Middle School Monday' social media posts which ask for examples of outstanding results.
Got a tip for us?
We're always interested in a good story. If you're aware of a special athlete or an unusual occurrence, drop us an email at jayslagle@hotmail.com and we'll see if it's something we can share in our Nerdsletter.
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First published at www.preprunningnerd.com by Jay Slagle on March 18, 2026. If you find an error, shoot us an e-mail at jayslagle@hotmail.com and we'll get it fixed.
Like this coverage of the Nebraska T&F and cross country scene? There's more of this at www.preprunningnerd.com. Check out the Blog tab for our frequent stories and the Results tab for every Nebraska high school meet we can find. If you want to see meet photos or just need to kill a few hours on social media, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @PrepRunningNerd or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/preprunningnerd.
Finally, if you think runners, jumpers and throwers are the best things on earth, you'll enjoy our two most popular articles. In 2018 we published "The Runner with the Broken Heart" about a high school boy who finished last in nearly every race he ran. In 2022 we published, "The Fall and Rise of Emmett ," a story about a high school triple jumper who became a quadrapalegic after a swimming accident.