“Grab a razorback by the tail and just hold on.”
That was the advice Penn sprinter Isabella Whittaker C’24 got from her uncle the night before racing in the 400-meter final at the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field in June.
And that was what she did, finishing just behind four members of the Arkansas Razorbacks women’s track team with a program and Ivy League record time of 50.17 seconds—more than six-tenths of a second faster than her previous personal best.
Finishing in fifth place, “I was almost a little disappointed at first,” said Whittaker, who earned first-team All-American honors for the performance. “But then I saw my time and was like, Dang, that’s fast.”
(After the Gazette went to press, Whittaker finished sixth on the same track in the US Olympic trials 400-meter final, qualifying for the 2024 Summer Olympics as a member of Team USA’s 4×400 relay pool. She’ll be joined in Paris by discus thrower Sam Mattis W’16 and 800-meter American champ Nia Akins Nu’20.)
The race marked the first time in NCAA Championships history that runners from the same school claimed the top four spots. If the Razorbacks want to duplicate the feat in a future race, they can look to Whittaker, who will take her graduate transfer year at the University of Arkansas before turning pro. “I was honored to be on the podium with them,” she said. “And I’ll be honored to be able to join them next year as well.”
Mostly, though, Whittaker embraced being at the national championships with her current teammates as 11 athletes from Penn’s men’s and women’s teams competed across eight events. That’s a far cry from her freshman season when Whittaker was the only athlete from Penn who qualified.
At that 2021 meet, Whittaker ran “super passive” and finished in last place out of 24 competitors in the 400. “I really did not act as if I belonged there,” she said. Returning to the same track three years later,
“I felt like a stronger, wiser, more confident version of myself.”
As Whittaker grew—and overcame injuries—during her time at Penn, so did her team. “Something that really motivated us was this year we were trying to put Penn on the map,” she said. On top of establishing themselves on the national stage with standout individual performances from, among others, Olivia Morganti W’24 (steeplechase) and Lily Murphy C’26 (10k and 5k), the Quakers also took care of business in the Ivies, winning the league’s Indoor Heptagonal Championships in February and following that up with the outdoor conference crown in May—in dramatic fashion.
Needing a win in the final race—the 4×400 relay—Aliya Garozzo C’24 overcame a big deficit in the anchor leg to pass Princeton and give the Quakers a half-point victory over the host Tigers for the meet.
Whittaker certainly did her part with victories in the 400, the 200, and the 4×100 relay, but the star speedster wasn’t used for the clinching 4×400 because of all the other races she did. Watching from the sidelines, she admitted, caused her some stress at first. But when Garozzo grabbed the baton for the final trip around Princeton’s track, Whittaker hollered at her “super gritty” classmate to make up the gap and then joined all her teammates in mobbing Garozzo at the finish line afterwards.
“That was super emotional,” Whittaker said, “because I learned to really trust my squad—and know that they have my back and that I have theirs.” —DZ
