Why star high school hurdler Jasmine Robinson wants ‘to be nobody again’

By Owen Murray

The last time Jasmine Robinson was nobody, she figures, was a little less than two years ago. It was the day before her high school state championship track meet, at Grisham Stadium in Carrollton, Georgia: 8 May 2024.

The now-senior, national champion dual hurdler was a sophomore then. Nobody had commented on her TikToks, telling her that they’d seen her race yet. Nobody was offering official visits to SEC schools yet. Nobody thought that she could catch them yet.

By the end of the meet, nobody could catch her. She’d broken the state-record time en route to a title in the 300m hurdles, laid down the 19th-best time in preps history in the 400m hurdles and grabbed another win in the 200m final. By the end of the meet on 11 May, she figures, she was someone.

Now, she’s flipping the script. Robinson committed to the University of Georgia in November. She thrived in high school as someone everyone knows; attached to her name are state and Nike Outdoor Nationals titles, multiple state Gatorade Player of the Year wins and selection to the Nike Elite training group. She’s ready to move on.

“I'm not saying I'm sick of high school, but I'm definitely ready to just get out there. Track-wise, I'm just excited,” she said. “Because I do better when I'm nobody.”

When she’s nobody?

“I want to be nobody again in the track world,” she said. “I'm looking forward to it…I think it fuels me to be nobody, because now I'm in Georgia. Everyone — I think most people — know I'm Jasmine.”

It’s true. Robinson has been busy writing her story over the length of a preps career that rose from that Georgia state meet in 2024 to national finals in Eugene, Oregon and the World Athletics U20 Championships in Lima, Peru. A pair of hurdles — one in Georgia and another in Lima — have held her back momentarily, but she’s ready to run a new story at the NCAA level for the Bulldogs in the fall, fueled by a perspective closer to what she felt on the track in Carrollton.

“I want to just go on the track like, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’” she said. “But then, ‘Oh, whoa, what is she pulling off right now?’

And then, boom.

“I'm going to be Jasmine Robinson again,” she said. “But I want it to be a new story.”

Robinson remembers two races from the last time she thinks she was nobody. The first hurdle that delayed her was there, in Carrollton in 2024.

She started to notice something in the first of the two races, the qualifier for the 300m hurdles final. It was the first one where she was ahead big, and where she felt like everything flowed perfectly.

Almost everything. She cleared the last hurdle on her left leg, not the right like she’d planned to. She ran 41.03 — still first place by over a second.

“Everyone was like, ‘Oh, that would have been in 39 (seconds). That would have been 39, if you stayed on your dominant leg."

She realized they were right. She went into the state race thinking that she just had to run the same race, and pick up the right leg on the last hurdle instead. In the final, she did.

The result?

“Boom. 39. So excited,” she said.

The personal goals she continues breaking start with a wall in her room, where she keeps goals written on sticky notes. Every time she adds a new one, it’s supposed to go on the wall. It’s not something that started with a moment — it just “randomly happened,” she said.

It came from something she remembered where she was told that, in order to make things happen, she needed to write them down. It wasn’t enforced there, but she wasn’t sharing them with anyone regardless. They were just for her.

“I sleep by my wall,” she said. “I see it every day. It’s nice to wake up by what I want to do.”

Robinson qualified for her first international final later that year. She and her club coach, Blane Williams, traveled to Lima, Peru in August 2024 for the World Athletics U20 Championships. The second hurdle lived there.

She doesn’t remember anything between the gun and the final turn. On the finish line, she was thinking, ‘I’m getting silver.’ She made it into the post-race hallways, near the media area, where she was waiting for the boys winners to come through, when she saw her replay on the TV, and a notice. She’d been disqualified for hooking a hurdle.

“I'm like, ‘It can't be real, it can't be real.’”

With her head down, she grabbed her bag. Williams was waiting outside the checkout area. He remembers, too.

“I just grabbed her and intercepted her right away from having to come back in and deal with the crowd,” he said. "I just shielded her from all that, and took her to a private spot where she could get her emotions out and we could talk a little bit.”

He took her jacket and put it over her head. Robinson remembers him saying, “Before you go back out there, let's get you right.”

“He let me cry it out,” she said.

“I just told her that this is just one day in a whole lot of days that she has on the track,” Williams said. ”This thing happened, you can't redo it at this point. We just move on.

She did. Three days or so after the race, Robinson saw her photos. She decided to post on Instagram, like she normally does, despite the disqualification. It wasn’t going to be a sad post, she decided.

“Revenge tour starts today,” she wrote. “And we’re going worldwide with it.”

“I knew I was 16 (years old), so I definitely had another chance to go again,” she said. “I'm not sad about it, but I think that it kind of built character on me because I don't want to…I'm not going out like that.”

She didn't.

Robinson hasn’t made the time to change the sticky notes from last season yet, but right now, the wall has paper goals that she thinks she met on it. Her individual time goals are there, but so is one for making it to the US U20 Championships.

She could’ve pulled that note down in July, when she made it to the meet in Eugene. There, she won a haul of medals: both Nike Outdoor Nationals hurdles titles, the U20 100m hurdles championship and silver in the U20 400m hurdles final. It’s not the end of the revenge tour, but it’s a start — and it’s fuel for her belief.

“I always say, ‘It’s one thing to say you’re going to do something,’” Robinson said. “‘But to actually, deep down in your soul and heart believe you’re going to do something is different than doing it all the time.’”

She needs an example to really explain the feeling.

“All right, let's just say something crazy,” she said. “I'm just going to use this as an example: Let's say that I just keep saying to people, ‘I'm gonna run the world record.’”

Okay. She’s going to run the world record.

“I have it in my head now, ‘I'm going to run the world record,’” she said. “But (unless it’s) deep down in my soul — I can say it all the time in my head, I can say it out loud — I don't think you can do it unless you believe it in your heart, too.”

Robinson committed to the University of Georgia on 30 November. It's one of Williams’ dreams, for all of his athletes.

“That, to me, is a life changing gift,” he said. “Whether they go to the Olympics or the pros or all that stuff, that's gravy, but at some point they have to get a job, so they need that education.”

Robinson is aiming to get back to Hayward Field, over and over. Her next goal on the revenge tour is the World Athletics U20 Championships Oregon 26, in August. On the way there, she’ll tuck a first season in the NCAA (and maybe another trip to Hayward Field, for the NCAA Outdoor Championships) under her belt.

Will she be nobody when she gets there? She doesn’t know. One of Robinson’s first coaches told Williams that, “She's the kind of person that may not get out on you from the start, but she's going to catch you and run you down. I don’t want her to be that way — I want her to go and get out (in front). But if that’s going to be who you are, if you’re going to be a seeker and a destroyer, then do that.

“But that’s not a nobody, you know?”

When asked to describe Robinson, Williams said she has a “big heart.” It was working to complete her world-record example of belief.

“It's not even just envisioning it, either,” Robinson said. “You can't just envision. You have to be crazy about it. You have to eat, sleep, breathe and know — know — that you know that you can do it.”