WSN: Welcome back to ‘In the Huddle,’ a podcast by the Washington Square News. I’m Kiran, sports editor at WSN, and here with me today is Alexa McMillian, a first-year on the track and field team. She’s a sprinter and also competes in the triple jump and the long jump. In her first ever UAA Championship, she got a second-place finish in the triple jump. Lovely to have you here, Alexa. 

McMillian: Yeah, good to be here. Good to be here. 

WSN: Now, how have you been finding NYU so far?

McMillian: I love it. I love the city, love the people, love the culture here. My track team’s been probably like my biggest support moving here, because I’m from North Carolina. So moving to the big city, I thought it was gonna be scary, but everyone here really made it feel like a home for me.

WSN: And, a lot of people don’t know this, but a lot of the track and field athletes are dual sport athletes, so they do cross country in the fall and track and field in the spring. But you’re only a track athlete, correct? 

McMillian: Yeah, correct.

WSN: Did you train at all either independently or with the team in the fall?

McMillian: Oh yeah. So, we started preseason around October or late September, so we’ve been training pretty much the whole school year.

WSN: Now, some of our listeners may not know, so could you go over the difference between the triple jump and the long jump?

McMillian: Long jump kind of sounds like just how it is. So you sprint out for a bit. There’s this thing called your approach, and you have to have a specific mark from the board. So for me, I’ll be like 118 feet away from the board. So you sprint up, and then you just take off, off whatever your dominant jumping leg is, and then you’re landing into the pit. You really just run and jump.

Triple jump is different. So there’s two different ways people do it. You could think about it left, left, right; or right, right, left. And so how you do it is basically, run up, same approach as a long jump. You take off whatever your dominant foot is, then you land on that foot. That’s your first phase. Your second phase, you’d be switching from whatever foot you just landed on to your other leg. That’s your second phase. And then your last phase is basically just like a broad jump into the pit.

WSN: Alright, really interesting. Now you were a four year team member in high school. You also played two years of basketball, I want to say. How’d you get into the long jump specifically, and the triple jump, in track?

McMillian: I started track freshman year. I was a sprinter and they were just having open tryouts for stuff. And then one of my friends, her name was Morgan, she was like, ‘Oh, girl, you should just try to long jump so we could hang out during practice.’ And so then I tried it, and I don’t know if I’d say I fell in love with it immediately, but it was just fun. And I happened to be good at it. So I was like, ‘okay, like let’s try it.’

What I really fell in love with was the triple jump. I tried that sophomore year, because I did pretty good as a freshman jumper. So I was like, ‘okay, let’s see what else I could do.’ I did long jump, triple jump, high jump. I didn’t stick with high jump because you gotta be flexible for that, and unfortunately I’m not. But triple jump, it was really fun. The thing I love most about triple jump is that it’s different than long jump. Long jump is all about — you just run fast, you jump and you have to land right. And then that’s it. But in triple jump, you could really fight for your distance in each phase. You really gotta want it. That’s what I love the most about it.

WSN: Now at the UAA championships, like I mentioned, you got second place in the triple jump with a distance of 11.48 meters. Talk me through what that whole weekend was like for you, what your mentality was.

McMillian: Okay. In all honesty, that meet was not my best meet at all. So in jumps there’s this thing called scratching. They measure your distance from the board, so if you’re in front of the board, it doesn’t count. It’s called scratching. So for that triple jump meet, you have three jumps, and then you have, if you make it to the finals, you have three more jumps. I made finals. Out of my six jumps, I scratched five of them. 

WSN: Wow. 

McMillian: Yeah. So I only had that one jump that counted, that somehow landed me second, and that was like a foot and a half behind the board. I was happy to get second, but I was pretty disappointed about how that went, to be honest. That weekend I really just wanted to prove myself, try to win, try to make my coach proud. But, I mean, I’ll take second any day, so.

WSN: Of course. And you still have a lot of meets left to go. 

McMillian: Oh, yeah. 

WSN: Of course, there’s NCAAs, and you have the Indoor Championships and then the whole outdoor season. Talk me through what your training is going to be like for the upcoming season.

McMillian: As of now, we’re taking it kind of easy because I have NCAAs coming up. So I’ll be kind of on a different training regimen, mainly trying to get my approach right — so I don’t, you know, scratch five times again. But my other teammates, we got the sprinters, the jumpers, the throwers. They’re gonna be working really hard because they’ve really got something to prove this outdoor season. So they’ll probably be doing a lot of high intensity stuff, you know? We work out in the weight room two to three times a week. So we’ll definitely be locking in for that.

WSN: Talk to me about your coaches and your fellow teammates. What have they been like so far, as you’ve started your first semesters?

McMillian: Oh my goodness. I love my teammates. I love my coaches. Gotta shout out Oliver [Fideler, volunteer assistant coach]. He’s a graduate student. He is literally like a brother I never had. He was primarily a jumper when he was at NYU — he’s still at NYU — but when he did track, he was primarily a jumper. He’s been such a big support, I was so blessed to have him. And then my other teammates: My jumpers, I have Nishad [Sankar], Areyanna [McCarthy], Amalia [Hronides], my friend Drew [Boyce]. Drew’s probably like one of my favorite seniors. They’re all seniors, by the way. There’s like three freshmen, maybe a sophomore, a junior, and then mostly seniors. 

WSN: Wow, okay. 

McMillian: So my jump squad — besides Amalia, who’s also a freshman — is mainly seniors, and they’re definitely really big role models. I gotten close with a lot of them, on and off the track. Like Drew for example, it’s funny, like he’s a little chef sometimes, so he’d be like making cookies and stuff. My other friends are sprinters. You’ve got Beverly [Okyere], Cindy [Leonard]. They’re really, really good people. They’ve really made this place feel like a home. Everyone is such a nice family.

WSN: Now, unlike some other schools, NYU doesn’t technically have its own track and field home venue, but they do use the Armory in uptown Manhattan. Talk me through a typical meet day at the Armory for you.

McMillian: With home meets at the Armory — at least from the sprinter, jumper, thrower side, we don’t all like arrive at the same time, because like our events could be like at very different times. We do try to show up pretty early to support everyone. But for me personally, a typical day, I would be jumping around, between 10 [a.m.] and 1 [p.m.]. So I’d wake up, try to drag myself out of bed, do my stretches, do my routine. I always listen to music. I’ll be replaying the same exact song over and over again, and then get all my stuff. I try to go to the recovery room just to make sure my body’s right, and then we would just hop on the train over. And then, it’s game time.

WSN: All right, I think that’s all my questions, but there anything else you wanna add so far about your first two semesters at NYU?

McMillian: It’s a really beautiful place. Whoever’s listening, I encourage y’all. Definitely, definitely, if you’re interested in a sport — ‘cause I’ll be real, I know NYU isn’t always the biggest on sports sometimes, especially going in, it’s like, ‘Oh, let me focus more on school.’ — if you have the time, do not be afraid to try a sport. Even if it’s just intramural or club, definitely chase after your passion. Don’t let school get in the way of that.

WSN: Thank you so much for joining me.

McMillian: Thanks so much for having me. 

WSN: All right. 

Contact Kiran Komanduri at [email protected].