SETTING GOALS Two-time All-American attributes her success to dedication

By every meaningful standard, Ute senior Amanda Mergaert has had an outstanding career. A two-time All-American who owns three school records, the Shelby Township, Mich., native has been dubbed by Utah head coach Kyle Kepler both the best middle distance runner and best cross country runner in school history.
Not bad for someone who wasn’t even the best runner on her high school team.
Yet such was the case with Mergaert, who began running cross country at Utica High School only when her coach mentioned that ice cream would be served after practice. The notion of competing on the collegiate level was foreign to Mergaert until her senior year, but her mother strongly encouraged her to make herself known in recruiting circles nonetheless.
Utah eventually came calling, and as Mergaert sat in Kepler’s office during her official visit to Utah, the fortunes of the Utes track and field program changed. Seeing the names of school record holders on the walls, Mergaert decided that she wanted to not only join this select company, but beat it.
“I’ve always been a dreamer and a goal setter,” Mergaert said. “This was something that I could set goals, and I felt like I knew some semblance of the steps on how to achieve them. The prospect of actually getting somewhere far as a collegiate athlete, I reveled at the opportunity to take advantage of that.”
Kepler has freshmen write their career goals down, and Mergaert wrote down that she also wanted to become an All-American. Kepler suggested Mergaert come up with smaller goals, but she held on to that piece of paper and achieved the distinction as a junior. She views that exchange with her coach as one of the defining moments of her career.
“She’s just a very, very driven human being,” Kepler said. “She puts high goals out there for herself. Even if sometimes she’s the only one that thinks it can be done, it doesn’t bother her. She doesn’t get caught up on what others think. She just wants to be as good as she can be, and she’s willing to put the work in to do it.”
That mindset set Mergaert on a trajectory of early success. As a freshman, Mergaert emerged as the leader of the cross country team when star Alyssa Abbott went down with an injury. During track season, Mergaert set the school record in the mile with a time of 4:51:21 after running it 15 seconds slower less than a month previous. It was at that point Kepler knew Mergaert could be great.
“That freshman year, she just showed these signs of just wanting to be good,” Kepler said. “It kind of went from there.”
Despite such great early success, Mergaert wasn’t happy. A lack of team chemistry coupled with dissatisfaction about her personal performance left her wanting to go back home. Phone calls to her mother were made just about daily, where she was encouraged to face the problems head on.
“I don’t think she thought she was good,” said her mother, Sharon Mergaert.
The Utes’ budding star saw things a little bit differently.
“I realized that I was good, but to me, I was never good enough,” Mergaert said. “I was always looking for ways to be better. I never really took a chance to soak in anything I did as a freshman because I was always raring to go at the next thing.”
Having worked through those challenges, Mergaert continued to lead the Utes over the next two seasons. As a sophomore, she narrowly fell short of becoming an All-American, and as a junior she nearly qualified for the Olympic Trials.
While some might be satisfied with those accomplishments, the close calls ate at Mergaert. Thanks to an increased maturity that has developed during her career, however, she was better able to cope with those disappointment than she was with the frustrations of her freshman year.
“She’s been a kid that’s had some near misses and kind of had to do it the hard way,” Kepler said. “It hasn’t been given to her. I think in actuality, [the close calls] have inspired her to keep working harder.”
For Mergaert, the inspiration is there because she recognizes that she doesn’t have as many chances left to succeed as she once did.
“Now I don’t have a next time, so it’s like, ‘Right now I’m gonna take advantage of it and I’m gonna do this,’ ” Mergaert said. “It’s kind of a different mindset now that I can see the end of my career.”
Though Mergaert is focused on some individual unfinished business, her freshman season serves as a reminder of how important it is to do her part in helping to maintain good team chemistry.
“Amanda recognizes [her stardom], and she hates that that is an aspect of a lot of people who are the top of the line, the stars,” said teammate and friend Megan Combe. “I have never seen her take herself away from the team in any way or feel like she has risen above the level that everyone else is at. She doesn’t ever attribute her successes to the fact that she’s just naturally talented. She truly believes that if you work hard, that good things are gonna happen.”
Such is exactly the lesson she hoped she could impart to her teammates during that difficult freshman year. Now as she wraps up her final season with the Utes, she wishes more time remained to do so.
“I think I was always planning my retirement as a freshman,” Mergaert said, “And now my retirement’s here, and I don’t want to leave.”