WOW! HS Senior Katy Zang runs a 3200 in 9:42!

May be a strange place but has a long & rich history of a lot of top talent coming out of the state and still has a lot of great talent now & in the future.

As far as Zang doing what she did and where “did she come from,” I’m not at all surprised by her performance. The talent has been there but as others have mentioned she’s had a history of injuries. Hopefully she gets that all sorted out.

Personally I thought that Duke bound Sophia Szolosi of Athens was the best girl in the state and she may still be based on being more consistent than Zang. I look for Szolosi to run a time this spring close to what Zang put up.

don't worry about it. they will probably botch this one just like they have with basically all their other recruits.

Saw this race live.

Unbelievable effort.

Indiana doesn't have much of a womens distance team. Now that Katy Zang has gone from being just pretty good to being one of the fastest high school girls of all time, I wonder if she will reconsider where she's going to college.

Missouri didn't and still doesn't have much of a women's distance team. Worked out well for someone named Karissa.

This is how much of a total outlier Katy Zang is. The top 10 girls on this list all either won, or were the runner up, at either Footlocker or NXN. So their great 3k/3200/2 mile times were not a surprise.

On the other hand, Katy Zang was never even able to qualify for NXN or Foot Locker/Brooks, nevermind being in the top 2. Her 9:42 3200 is probably the biggest surprise out-of-nowhere high school distance performance ever. I can’t even think of another distance runner who was close to doing something like this.

Not as big of a surprise if you have followed her. Injuries have plagued her, unfortunately. "Ohio XC" mentioned Sophia Szolosi a few posts up. Don't be surprised if she is in that group by the end of the season. Szolosi was the Brooks XC Midwest champ and was 4th at the national meet.

No, I doubt that she's doping. She has had bad luck with ill-timed injuries. If I am not mistaken she ran 16:55 5k XC her sophomore year and would have bettered that last year but was injured again. She still went 17:05 last fall but I don't think she ran at the state meet. So her improvement is really not coming from "very average." The talent has been there.

This list really show the lack of depth in HS girls distance running compared to the boys. From one to ten, there is a gap of 28 seconds for the girls and five seconds for the boys.

The gap in the girls' times from number 2 to number 11 is only 8 seconds, which is about the same as the 5 second gap for the top 10 boys.

Jane Hedengren doesn't count. She is an extreme outlier. She is a once in a lifetime freak of nature from another planet. She was better than almost all of the college women while she was still in high school. There is no high school boy who can beat almost all of the college men in a 3k or a 5k.

Leah Starkey (sophomore) 9:48.02 and Averi Lowen (junior) 9:52.57 at Nike Indoors

Zang, Dudek, Hennessey, Wilson, Garmer, and others on the track at New Balance right now.

https://live.athletic.net/meets/63313/live/track/track