Dean looks to continue roll
Texas Tech intermediate hurdler on hot streak entering Olympic Trials
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1a6e9437-58f7-42b6-8083-d34b6e8175be_1200x800.jpeg)
Competing in your first race 29 days before the end of the collegiate season is not a typical, nor ideal, way to produce a stellar performance in the NCAA Track & Field Championships.
Yet that scenario worked for Caleb Dean of Texas Tech University this year.
Dean, who expects to complete his studies for a master’s degree in Financial Planning in December, was scheduled to open his outdoor season in the Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays in late March. But when he sustained a groin injury in training a few days before that meet, Dean and his coaches and trainers at Texas Tech had to come up with a way to keep him in shape for the four to six weeks he was expected to be sidelined.
Although the resulting plan prevented him from running his first race of the season until a first-round heat of the men’s 110-meter high hurdles in the Big 12 Conference championships on May 9, Dean turned in one of the best individual performances of the NCAA championships at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field on June 6 when he won the 400 intermediate hurdles in 47.23 seconds.
The scintillating time crushed Dean’s previous best of 48.05, was the second fastest in collegiate history, and moved him into a tie for 11th on the all-time performer list and into sixth on the all-time U.S. list.
In addition, he will be the fourth-fastest performer in the world this year when the first-round heats of the intermediate hurdles are contested in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Eugene, Oregon, later today. The heats are scheduled to start at 9:20 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time, with Dean entered in the third of five races.
“I definitely feel the injury has helped me in some ways,” Dean said. “Because I started competing in the conference meet and my second meet was regionals, I have a few races under my belt, but I’m still fresh at the same time.”
Collegiate track and field athletes are often coming off intensive indoor and outdoor seasons as they enter the Olympic Trials or the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships in non-Olympic years. But that’s not the case with Dean, who had lowered his personal best from 48.39 to 48.05 in the West Preliminary Round meet in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on May 24, before equaling that mark in a semifinal of the NCAA championships on June 5, two days before the final.
“I wasn’t trying to run that fast, but the race felt easy to me,” Dean said of his performance that won his semifinal by nearly a second and a half and was more than half a second faster than the next-fastest performer in any of the three heats. “I might have run a little bit too hard for the prelims at nationals. But I took it out and then maintained. I wanted to give everyone a statement and give them something to think about.”
Defending NCAA champion Chris Robinson of Alabama, Big 12 champion Nathaniel Ezekiel of Baylor, and Clement Ducos of Tennessee were the three fellow competitors whom Dean most likely had in mind when he made that statement.
Ducos, who is the fifth-fastest Frenchman in history with a best of 48.26, got off to a strong start in the final. But he slowed down substantially, and eventually dropped out of the race, after clearing the second of 10 hurdles, the apparent victim of a strained hamstring.
Dean, who usually gets out well, found himself with a clear lead at that point in the race and he never allowed Robinson, Ezekiel, or anyone else to seriously challenge him for the victory as his 47.23 clocking left him left him well ahead of second-place Robinson, who ran 47.98, and third-place Ezekiel, who timed 48.88.
“The plan was always to run my race,” Dean said when asked if the injury to Ducos affected his performance. “I always get a good start out of the blocks. I use my 6.5 [60-meter] speed to get out. The focus after that is on you. What’s going on around you doesn’t matter. All you need to do is execute the race.”
Texas Tech assistant coaches Calvin Robinson and Zach Glavash, who work together in the training of Dean, were ecstatic with his victory.
“I was more excited that he became a national champion than with his time,” Robinson said. “Because that was one of his goals when he came here, to win a national title.”
For Glavash, Dean’s win was proof that he knew what he was talking about after he watched Dean run 48.43 to finish second in the Big 12 Conference meet behind Ezekiel’s Nigerian record of 48.00.
“The level he got to at the Big 12s in his first meet of the season really opened my eyes,” Glavash said. “After watching him there, I thought, ‘Oh, he’s going to win the national title this year. He’s going to do something special.’ ”
Robinson said he had told Dean that “Nate’s probably going to beat you at conference, but we’ll be ready for the meet that matters most. By the time we get to the national championships, we’ll be ready to roll.”
While Dean admits he’s not that knowledgeable about all the names and times of the fastest intermediate hurdlers in history, his new status as one of the 12 fastest performers ever has caught his attention.
“After the NCAAs, a lot of people were talking about me being tied for 11th all time,” he said. “But I don’t know that much about the event when it comes to those lists.”
It is very interesting to examine Dean’s standing on the all-time U.S. performer list as the five men ahead of him are Rai Benjamin at 46.17, Kevin Young at 46.78, Edwin Moses at 47.02, Bryan Bronson at 47.03, and Andre Phillips at 47.19.
While 1992 Olympic champion Young, 1976 and ’84 Olympic champion Moses, 1988 Olympic champion Phillips, and 1997 World Championship bronze medalist Bronson are all retired, Benjamin was the silver medalist in the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021 and is expected to battle defending champion Karsten Warholm of Norway and Alison dos Santos of Brazil for the Olympic title in Paris in August.
Though it would be unrealistic to expect Dean to make another big drop in his personal best this season, Robinson and Glavash both say he can run faster as he is extremely athletic.
Robinson points out that there are very few, if any, intermediate hurdlers who have run 6.52 seconds for 60 meters, as Dean did during the indoor season. And Dean is the only athlete to have ever won NCAA titles in the 60-meter high hurdles indoors and in the 400 intermediates outdoors in the same year.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbb6b0c14-3266-463e-8ce1-fc3d99f65b19_1200x800.jpeg)
In addition to winning the 60 high hurdles in the NCAA indoor championships in March, Dean also placed sixth in the 60 and ran the first leg on a team that placed fourth in the 4 x 400 relay while helping Texas Tech win its first indoor team title.
Robinson also calls Dean one of the toughest athletes he has ever coached and uses Dean’s performance in last year’s NCAA outdoor championships as an example of that toughness.
After posting the No. 4 qualifying time in the semifinals of that meet at the University of Texas, Dean was hopeful of contending for the title and bettering his personal best of 48.39 in the final two days later. But he tweaked something in one of his feet while warming up for the final and ended up finishing fourth in 48.56 while competing with what turned out to be hairline fracture that led to him wearing a walking boot for much of the summer.
“He’s very cerebral,” Glavash added about Dean. “But he doesn’t overthink things. When it’s time to race, he just reacts and goes.”
Dean, who just turned 23, was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and grew up playing football and running track. He excelled as a running back in football and as a 100 and 200-meter sprinter in track. But by the time he turned 13, some of his teammates were becoming taller, bigger, and stronger than him.
His father, Joseph, said it was around that time that Caleb and a player from another all-star youth football team raced each other in an impromptu contest one day and they tied for first place the first time they ran. But Caleb was beaten when they raced a second time and Joseph remembers him being in tears afterward because he never lost in the sprints.
Realizing that the 100 and 200 were no longer going to be what he called his “bread and butter” events, Dean took up the triple jump and long jump as a 5-foot-1, 95-pound freshman at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland. He also stopped playing football around that time.
Although his dad said he did well enough in the triple jump that he could have competed in that event at the collegiate level, Caleb recalls running 16.4 in his first race in the 110-meter high hurdles in May of his sophomore year.
He had never hurdled before then, but he had watched hurdlers in the past so he had some idea about the basics of the event and he soon began to progress in the 300-meter intermediates as he grew from 5-foot-5 as a sophomore to 5-8 as a junior to 5-10 as a senior.
Although he was the fastest intermediate hurdler in Maryland as a senior, his personal best of 37.26 was tied for 28th on the national performer list that year and he was not heavily recruited. He chose to attend the University of Maryland after also being recruited by Syracuse and Memphis.
He advanced to the semifinals of the NCAA championships in the 400 intermediate hurdles in 2021 and ’22, but entered the transfer portal because he felt like there were other programs that would give him a greater chance at maximizing his potential in the hurdles.
His mother, Angela Tanner-Dean, said that Caleb will always be grateful that Maryland gave him an opportunity to compete at the collegiate level, as well as the support he needed to gain confidence in himself.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F07160596-e511-429a-a41b-d883c0a9173d_3261x4891.jpeg)
According to Joseph, Caleb communicated with coaches from Florida, Auburn, South Carolina, Baylor, and Texas Tech before he transferred to the school in Lubbock.
While the track and field program, coaches, and facilities were big factors in why he came to Texas Tech, the school also had a highly-regarded finance program, an area in which Dean had developed a real interest during 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic had led to the cancellation of the NCAA Indoor Track & Field Championships in March, as well as the entire outdoor season.
Dean’s parents describe him as a very active person who will never have a job that requires him to sit behind a desk from 9-5.
Joseph says he “often has more things going on in his life than we would like, but he somehow finds time to get it all done.”
Angela adds that Caleb “has lots of ideas and is often thinking about what he can do to have the greatest impact.”
Glavash points out that Dean already has a real estate license and he typically carries a heavy academic load at Texas Tech.
He adds that prior to the NCAA championships, Dean wasn’t certain if he would compete at the post-collegiate level if he did not run well. That he had plenty of other things he could be doing, like becoming a certified financial planner.
Now that he ran more than well in the NCAA meet, Dean is definitely thinking about competing professionally.
“He’s riding high,” Glavash said. “He’s happy. He’s on top of the world. It’s important that he knows that he deserves to be on the Olympic team.”
Robinson adds that Dean “has to stay composed and not let the moment get too big for him. He’s got the physical skill set to make the Olympic team.”
For his part, Dean said he’s “definitely happy about being on that great list and I’m looking forward to dropping my name closer to the No. 1 spot in the future. But I have to stay focused and I can’t let that get in my head too much.”