As he got set on the starting blocks on the track at Rock Chalk Park, Isaiah Bates closed his eyes and performed a pre-race prayer before running in the 100-meter prelims.

Bates opened his eyes before the starting gun went off. By the time he finished the race, he opened the eyes of thousands of spectators in the stands at the 100th anniversary of the KU Relays.

Bates took first in the 100-meter race, running a 10.41 in both the prelims and the finals, setting his own PR and giving him the fastest time in the state of Kansas for the event.

As a sprinter from a small school like Pleasanton, which clocked in at 119 students on the most recent enrollment numbers, his performance took a lot of people by surprise. 

But his times probably should not have.

Bates entered the competition as the two-time Class 2A state champion in the 100-meter and entered this season consistently posting sub-11 second times in the event.

“I really didn’t feel like an underdog,” Bates said. “I felt like I was right up there with these dudes. But it’s cool to be able to put Pleasanton up on a level like that with these bigger schools. That’s cool to me.”

Bates proved he was not an underdog, although he also ended up not being the frontrunner after the prelims. He actually headed into the final with the No. 2 time as Rock Bridge senior Zach Hood took first. However, Hood’s 10.37 second time was in a different heat than Bates and with a bigger wind assist at 6.1 m/s compared to 4.8.
 

Hood did not run in the finals the next day, joining the long list of Did Not Start designations on a cold and gloomy final day of the KU Relays, which was ultimately rained out. Bates felt let down by missing out on the chance to face Hood head-to-head in the final.

“I don’t put it against him, but I was really looking forward to racing him,” Bates said. “Because that 100 really felt very smooth. I didn’t really feel like I had someone pushing me along the way, so I really wish he would’ve been in that race with me.”

After his performance, Bates and his coaches received a lot of positive feedback from their community and other small schools in the area such as Jayhawk Linn and Prairie View.

“We have kids that we’re friends with over there and I’ve had people congratulate me that I don’t even know,” Bates said. “But we’re all really close around here, so it’s cool to get that.”

Pleasanton track and field boys head coach Dan Saulsberry, who has worked as an official at the KU Relays for more than a decade and half, had a tough time recalling too many track and field student-athletes from Southeast Kansas having similar standout performances in this prestigious track meet in Lawrence.

“There have been some athletes from our neighboring school here at Jayhawk Linn that’s gone up there,” Saulsberry said.

Saulsberry said he heard from many of his fellow track coaches in the region about Bates’ performance, as well as receiving a lot of congratulations on social media.

“Coaches around us were up there and made comments to me about how they got to watch Isaiah run and how it was really good to see him run with the competition,” Saulsberry said.

Bates won’t get many opportunities to face a similar level of competition again until the state meet, where he’ll try to win his third straight Class 2A state title in the 100 meter. He will also be looking for his first 200-meter state title. He finished first at state prelims last year, but pulled his hamstring before the finals. In 2021, he took third in the 200-meter prelims before finishing eighth in the finals.

Bates and his coaches are looking at the Madison Invitational on April 28 as his last truly competitive meet before state. This will be the third straight year that Bates goes head-to-head in the 100-meter and 200-meter races with that event’s hometown star, Madison’s Bryson Turner.

“That’s when he ran his first 10.5 time at that meet last year,” Saulsberry said. “He really gets up for those challenges.”

Two years ago, Turner took first in both races. It looked like Turner would repeat that result at last year’s Madison Invitational as he held a sizable advantage over Bates in the prelims of both races.

But Bates took Turner down in both finals as he set PRs in each, including a 10.52 in the 100 meter to win by one-hundredth of a second. His 21.47 in the 200-meter broke the Pleasanton school record, which had stood since 1979, by nearly a full second.

Bates plastered his name all over the Pleasanton track and field leaderboard, despite coming to town just five short years ago and without much of an interest in the sport.

Bates was born in Baldwin City, but he and his family ended up relocating to a rural community along the Texas-Oklahoma border when he was young. Bates went to a small Christian school with only six or seven kids per class.

When his family decided to move back to Kansas about five years ago, his father Tony Bates searched for a small, rural community that would not overwhelm his kids as they adjusted to new schools. It also allowed them to move to a place with a few acres of farmland for his daughter’s animals. Also, it fit their budget.

“As a single parent, Pleasanton was cheap,” Tony said.

It was not a big transition to small-town life for Isaiah, but it did take him a while to warm-up to the idea of running track. In fact, Isaiah said he “hated” the sport as a seventh grader.

“I didn’t want to do it at all,” Isaiah said. “I was going to be an NBA Player.”

Isaiah laughed when he said his old dream out loud. That’s because by the next year, it became clear to Isaiah that he was really good at track. His basketball trajectory was not nearly as high.

“After my eighth-grade year, I was like, ‘I guess I’m not a basketball player,’” Isaiah said. “It was a sad day, but I put up them track goals and said, ‘I’m going to get these.’”

He did hold onto one basketball goal though, and he achieved it.

“I didn’t see myself going far in basketball, but I at least had to be able to dunk,” Isaiah said. “There was no option, I had to be able to dunk at some point, so I’m happy I got that one.”

That same year, Isaiah started to write his running goals on index cards that he’d paste to his wall at home.

Throughout his junior year, he’d look up an index card stating the goal of breaking 10.8 seconds in the 100 meter. He’d check that off twice at last year’s state meet. He set the Class 2A wind-legal record of 10.79 in the prelims before getting 10.5 with wind in the final.

Another goal was to break the school record in the 200 meter. He accomplished that with his 21.4 to beat Turner in the Madison Invitational last year. He’s still chasing a new PR after that race, but he’s bested the old school record multiple times since.

It was not a specific goal on an index card, but Isaiah called his KU Relays performance his “biggest achievement" in athletics so far.
 

“But what I was most proud of was winning the state championship my sophomore year,” Isaiah said. “I didn’t hardly know what state really was and I figured I was going to be racing some guys way faster than me.”

Isaiah said he thought he had “zero chance” of winning the 100 meter. He ended up winning with a time that looking back he does not view as very fast.

“But when I won that, it felt the best,” Isaiah said.

As good as it felt, Isaiah still went into that summer dead set on closing the gap on the fastest runners from across the state.

“A lot of people would tell him in school, ‘Sprinters never get it faster,’” Tony said. “Well, it was time for me to start digging and researching more on how to make him more explosive.”

Tony, the Pleasanton track and field girls head coach and sprint coach, quickly identified one of the first steps to catching up. It was fairly simple: the top sprinters use starting blocks and Isaiah did not.

“Well, being a distance runner and I’ll be 57 in another week, we never had to do blocks,” Tony said. “But I’ve had to learn it so I can teach it.”

He started with teaching Isaiah during the summer of 2021, which ultimately led to shaving his 100-meter time down from 11.1 to 10.5. 

Isaiah’s newest index card goal is running a sub-10.2 in the 100 in all conditions, as well as breaking 21 seconds in the 200-meter. Tony has full faith that his son will accomplish those.

“He’s always been able to achieve his goals,” Tony said. “He has the work ethic and he generally sees what he’s doing and the purpose of it.”

As his son's sprint coach, Tony said he likes to keep Isaiah’s workout routines simple with a standard sprint routine a few times a week, followed by Isaiah conducting core work on his own by doing squats, hex bar deadlifts, pull-ups and other exercises.

Isaiah and Tony are both praying for an injury-free finish to the regular season. If that happens, Isaiah will look to compete in Nike Nationals this summer, which he qualified for last year but ended up sitting out.

After that, Isaiah will join the Fort Scott Community College track and field team. Isaiah said Fort Scott was not originally on his radar, but he looked at various Division II schools located nearby. He ultimately chose to run for the Greyhounds because he connected with Fort Scott's head track and field coach Philip Redrick.

“He was a former professional sprinter and he did bobsledding,” Isaiah said. “I really liked what he was doing. I saw how he was improving people at his college and making them better.”

Redrick's experience as a runner matches up well with what Isaiah is hoping to accomplish. Redrick also took the junior college route before ultimately ending up at Texas Southern University. There he became a three-time All-American on his way to breaking a dozen school and conference records. He also reached the top 15 of sprinters in the world in 2011 before eventually joining the coaching ranks.

In addition to Redrick’s accomplishments mirroring Isaiah’s hopes for his own running career, Isaiah and Tony liked what they saw when they looked at Fort Scott’s roster and previous success with sprinters.

“The coaches had a history of improving times when the kids got in there to when they left in two years,” Tony said.

Tony, who describes himself as a crazy “biohacker guy,” delved deep into the statistics surrounding the programs that his son was looking at joining. Tony said he could see a discernible difference in growth for sprinters in the Fort Scott program vs. many of those other programs.

“(Redrick) had 14 people on his roster who could break 11 in the 100,” Tony said. 

Isaiah said it was important to him to join a team with that much in-house competition.

“I had options to go somewhere (else), but I didn’t want to be the fastest dude on the team,” Isaiah said. “I want to go somewhere where I have three or four guys just as fast as me so I can get better. That’s what Fort Scott is.

“My future goal is that I would like to run as a career and see how far I can go."

His ultimate goal would be to compete at the Olympics and see if he can bring home some gold. 

After that, Isaiah said he’d be interested in pursuing a coaching career like his dad. Tony already sees some signs that Isaiah can pull it off. Tony uses his son as a live-action example for coaching up the rest of the Pleasanton sprinters.

“I can talk about pushing out of the blocks, splitting your arms and keeping your face down,” Tony said. “When kids are struggling to do it, they can just look over at Isaiah. He’s a good example on what to do and how to apply what I’m saying.

“He’s actually teaches hands-on as well.”

In addition to giving Pleasanton a coaching assist, Isaiah has also served as a walking recruitment poster for the team. Tony said the program has seen the number of sprinters on the team double from last year to this year, and he has no doubt his son affected that trend.

“Everyone wants to be a sprinter after seeing him be successful,” Tony said.