GETTING THE MAX OUT OF MAX
Freshman Willis Has Some Busy Days Ahead

By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Foundation

Between prelims and finals at the county, region and state championships in Maryland, Maxwell Willis felt like he was running non-stop . . . over and over and over again.

As a junior at Bowie High School in Prince George's County, he won 4A state championships in the 100, 200 and 400 meters and was named the Maryland Gatorade Athlete of the Year.

So, if he has to run as many as six races this weekend in the 100, 200 and both the 4x100 and 4x400 relays at the Big 12 Outdoor Championship in Lawrence, Kan., that's not asking too much.

"If you put me in there, I'm not going to want to come out," said the Baylor freshman, who ranks sixth nationally in the 100 meters (10.08) and ninth in the 200 (20.36), with a chance to sweep both events at the conference championships. "People are afraid to hurt, and you need that hurt in track to keep you going. It makes you better. People are afraid of that, and I don't know why."

Associate coach Michael Ford, who recruits and coaches the sprinters, said Willis actually gets upset when he pulls him out or holds him out of races. During the outdoor season, he's only run the 100 meters twice, the 200 three times and a total of seven relay races between the 4x100, 4x400 and sprint medley.

"They have that mindset coming out of high school where they ran a lot of races," Ford said. "So, I don't think it bothers him to do it. I just think right now, there's no need to run the 100, 200, 4x1, 4x4 every weekend. But, he knows this is a big weekend for him."

Not exactly lacking for confidence, Willis said he wanted to "shock the world a little bit" as a freshman, "because people always sleep on freshmen." His goals were to win a Big 12 championship and place at the NCAA Championships.

Check. Check.

He took care of that during the indoor season, winning the conference 200-meter title in 20.76 and adding runner-up finishes in the 60 meters (6.67) and 4x400 relay (3:06.25). Seeded 13th at the NCAA Indoor Championships, Willis barely squeaked into the 200-meter finals and finished fifth with a personal-best time of 20.69.

"People kept telling me that it's hard to make it to the NCAAs," he said. "But, if you focus and you put your mind to it and you continue to work hard ÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢' ¬" even when there's times where you know you could easily give up ÃÆ' ¢Ãƒ ¢' ¬" and you just keep pushing yourself, you can go anywhere you want to go. And that's really what happened."

In the first of two sections of the 200-meter finals at the indoor meet, Willis had to run against 2016 champion Christian Coleman of Tennessee and runner-up Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of LSU. "Everybody bleeds like I bleed, they're human. I'm not scared of any human," he said.

Second behind Coleman coming off the banked curve, Willis was nipped by Mitchell-Blake on the final stretch and placed fifth overall to earn All-America honors and score the only points for the men's team.

"There's just no need to think about somebody else's path, think about what they can do," Willis said, "when you already know what you can do and what you're capable of. So, that's what I do. I just use what I'm capable of and do what I can do."

The way Ford puts it is to "be the best Maxwell you can be."

"If you make a final at NCs or the Big 12, you're going to have to run fast times to do well," Ford said.

"So, we really don't focus so much on who's in the race. He knows the competition. We kind of just focus on, 'Hey, let's just be the best Maxwell you can be.' He's at that point now where he wants to be really good. And he puts in the work in practice. That's the thing that helps him more than anything. He's still learning a bunch on the track side of it, but he likes to compete."

When Ford recruited Willis out of Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, D.C., where he spent his senior year, he saw him as more of a 200-400 runner. And while he's been a staple on the 4x400 relay, he's become a threat in the 100 as well, even at the national level.

"He's still learning the 200, but I feel a lot more confident in the (200) than the 100," Ford said. "Not to say that he can't make it, but he's got to pop the 100 and he has to execute. He doesn't have a lot of wiggle room in the 100 right now. But, in the 200, he can kind of screw it up a little bit and still run fast. Going into the season, we talked about going to nationals in both and trying to make the finals in both. So, that's still the plan."

Partially because of Willis' contributions, head coach Todd Harbour says, "We hope we can have our best conference meet ever on the men's side." The 10th-ranked Bears also have big-point capability in the 400 (Wil London and George Caddick), 800 (Zac Curran), 110 hurdles (Rhys Phillips), 400 hurdles (Antwuan Musgrove) and both relays.

"We think we can score over 100 (points)," Harbour said. "I don't know if that will be enough to win it, but the ladies had to get there first before they could score 130 (in winning this year's Big 12 indoor title). Our men's highest was 102, so we're going to shoot for that and see where it takes us."

Coming off their first conference championship, the 12th-ranked Baylor women are poised to challenge No. 7 Texas and 11th-ranked Kansas State in the team race.

Indoor event champions Annie Rhodes (pole vault), Cion Hicks (shot put), Kiana Hawn (600), Maggie Montoya (3,000) and the 4x400 relay lead the way, but the Bears expect to get big points as well from Taylor Bennett and Kiana Horton in the 100 and 200 and Leticia De Souza in the 400, along with Brianna Richardson and Rachel Toliver in the triple jump.

"With the indoor, we talked about it a couple weeks out, so that when we got to the week of, it was, 'Hey, let's just focus on what we've got to do,''' Harbour said. "But, we haven't made a big deal of it yet because of going through finals. I didn't want to stress them out last week, starting to think about it. As we get closer, they'll start realizing, we are the Big 12 indoor champions. They know it. We just haven't made a big deal of it."

The meet begins Friday with the heptathlon, decathlon, hammer, javelin and 10,000 meters. Day 2 opens with the multi events at 10 a.m., with field events starting at 3 p.m. and running prelims at 4. And then on Sunday, the field events kick off the day at 2:30 p.m., with running finals scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. at Rock Chalk Park in Lawrence, Kan.