“I think about that quite a bit,” Leep said. “I probably never would have tried again.”
Leep made the team and made the most of the chance during her junior year at Kenton Ridge High School. At the state track meet in 2000, she held off her biggest rival, Northwestern’s Jessica Oakes, at the finish.
The two entered the Division II state meet with the top regional times, and they came into the backstretch at Dayton’s Welcome Stadium in second and third place. Leep seized the lead and won in a personal-best time of 5 minutes, 2.81 seconds. Oakes finished in 5:03.38.
“I didn’t know how close she was,” Leep said then. “I just wanted to go out and do my best.”
Leep, now 27 and a juvenile probation officer in Springfield, called it one of her best memories. She was the second — and still the last — individual state champion from Kenton Ridge. Burt Anderson won the shot put in 1987.
“I remember being super excited, but at the same time tired,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe I just did that.’ It was just a surreal moment.”
Leep doesn’t remember being nervous.
“Now that I look back on it as an adult, I get nervous,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine doing that now.”
A year after winning the championship as a junior, Leep finished fourth in the 1,600 as a senior. She went on to run for four seasons at the University of Kentucky. She still runs today, recently completing her first half marathon — not bad for someone whose career almost never got out of the starting blocks.
“She’s one of those girls that basically came out of nowhere,” Kenton Ridge coach Don Monroe said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0351 or djablonski@coxohio.com.
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