From salesman to world-leading hurdler: former champ bursts over barriers in unlikely return
Out for nearly three years, Tinch tops yearly world list in men's 110-meter high hurdles entering USATF Champs
In a year full of breakthrough moments for Cordell Tinch, one of the first came during a track and field meet in which he was a spectator.
It was late January, and the 22-year-old former Big 12 Conference champion in the men’s 110-meter high hurdles hadn’t competed in three years. He hadn’t trained during that time. Nor had he even run regularly.
Mishaps around college transfer credits and eligibility, the global pandemic, a summer working 12-hour shifts as a machine operator in a paper mill, and two years as a salesman for a cell phone company had interrupted his track and field career path.
But now — watching the proceedings at the Pittsburg State Invitational indoor meet, having just finished his second week of classes in his first semester return to college life at NCAA Division II Pittsburg State University in southeast Kansas — Tinch felt like he was back where he belonged.
“I wasn’t competing yet, but just being back in that atmosphere, and taking everything in, I just had this kind of unexplainable feeling about how I felt about track and field,” he said. “So knowing I still had that passion for it was a big turning point for me. That’s when I really believed I could start taking track serious again.”
Tinch’s performances since that day have made him a huge surprise of the 2023 track and field season.
After opening his indoor season with victories in the 60-meter high hurdles (7.66 seconds) and the long jump (7.94 meters, 26 feet 0¾ inches) in the Washburn University Open and Multis meet Feb. 3-4, he capped it with wins in the high hurdles (7.51) and high jump (2.18, 7-1¾) in the NCAA Division II Championships at the Virginia Beach Sports Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia on March 10 and 11.
Then came a collegiate outdoor season that saw him run 13.21 in the 110-meter high hurdles, clear 2.21 (7-3) in the high jump, and leap 8.16 (26-9¼) in the long jump, and win all three events in the NCAA Division II Championships at Colorado State University Pueblo from May 25-27.
However, the performance that sent shock waves around the global track world occurred on June 23 when Tinch ran 12.96 to win the high hurdles in the Trackwired Arkansas Grand Prix in Fayetteville.
Due to that effort, Tinch will be the unlikeliest of yearly world-leading performers when he competes in the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon later this week.
The four-day meet, which began at 11:25 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time, with heats in the heptathlon’s 100-meter hurdles earlier today, will determine most of the U.S. athletes who will compete in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary from Aug. 19-27. However, it is highly likely that some individuals will later be named to the team based on their World Athletics rankings if they have not met the qualifying standard for the World Championships.
Tinch is scheduled to run in a first-round heat of the high hurdles at 5:37 p.m. on Saturday, and he will then compete in the final of the long jump, which is set to start at 5:40.
The semifinals of the high hurdles are scheduled to start at 6:02 p.m. on Sunday, with the final scheduled to conclude the meet at 7:53.
“I’m still grasping it,” Tinch said when asked about the first six months of the year during a telephone interview conducted several hours before he ran his stunning 12.96.
“I believe it was yesterday or the day before and I had a memory pop up on my phone, and it was me in the factory with my dad working. To realize that not so long ago, I was completely removed from this sport, and now I’m being talked about a lot and respected as an athlete… If you would have told me in that factory that all of this would be happening now, I would have told you I do not believe that even in the slightest way.”
Tinch has taken a long and circuitous route to get to where he is today.
It has been filled with plenty of frustration, as well as starts and stops, but he says he wouldn’t change his journey for anything.
The 6-foot-2 (1.88), 175-pound (79) Tinch competed in football, basketball, and track and field during his prep days at Bay Port High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Although he is best known for his prowess in the high hurdles at the moment, he felt the triple jump might have been his best track and field event in high school as he had a prep best of 49-2¼ (14.99) in it. He also had bests of 6-10 (2.09) in the high jump, 24-3½ (7.40) — indoors — in the long jump, and 14.18 in the high hurdles.
He was skilled enough as a wide receiver in football that he was recruited by the University of Minnesota to play that sport, as well as compete in track and field, for the Golden Gophers. But after spending much of the summer before his freshman year training with both programs, he felt the stress of being pulled hard in two directions.
“It just seemed like there was some miscommunication between the track and field coaches and the football coaches,” Tinch said. “Just about what I was doing on a day-to-day basis. There was a lot on my plate and I didn’t know how to stand up and speak for myself, and say, Heh. We’re doing a lot of things here. Can we tone it down a little bit? I was just kind of rolling with it, trying to make things work.”
After talking with his parents and some of his close friends about the situation, he made the decision to focus on track and field at Minnesota.
One of the reasons he chose track was the tight relationship he had with Golden Gopher coach Paul Thornton, who had previously told Tinch he thought track and field was the sport best suited to his athletic talents. But after Thornton accepted a job offer at the University of Kansas for the spring semester of 2019, Tinch transferred there and had a notable freshman year for the Jayhawks.
He finished third in the high jump (2.19/7-2¼), fifth in the 60 high hurdles (7.95), and seventh in the long jump (7.34/24-1) in the Big 12 Conference Indoor Championships before running a then-personal best of 13.72 to win the conference title in the 110 high hurdles outdoors.
He dropped that time to 13.63 when he won a first-round heat of the NCAA West Region Preliminary meet nearly two weeks later. And after following that with a 13.70 clocking in a quarterfinal the next day, he easily advanced to the NCAA Championships as one of the top 12 overall finishers from the region.
But soon his competitive life would take a turn. Within a week of that performance, Tinch learned he was not eligible to compete in the NCAA meet in Austin, Texas because of an issue with some of his class credits from Minnesota transferring to Kansas.
Tinch was blind-sided by the ruling, and he found it particularly frustrating because he figured any issues about transfer credits should have come to light long before he had qualified for the NCAA meet.
His frustration grew during the spring semester of 2020 when he said he was again declared ineligible due to things he thought had been cleared up.
As a result, he competed unattached in one meet — the Jayhawk Classic in late January — during the 2020 indoor season.
When the start of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted cancellation of all NCAA sports championships contested in March or later of that spring semester, he decided KU was no longer the place for him.
Having no specific plan in place, he spent that summer working as a machine operator at a Georgia Pacific paper mill in Green Bay where his stepdad Tyler Simmons — whom Tinch refers to as his dad for as long as he can remember — was employed.
The work was not easy and the 12-hour shifts — from either 6 in the morning to 6 at night, or from 6 at night to 6 in the morning — led to a life in which Tinch’s mom, Elizabeth Tinch-Simmons, said her son basically ate, slept, and worked.
“He didn’t really have much free time,” she said. “And when he did have a weekend off, he spent much of it sleeping… That was a reality check when he realized what his life was like at such a young age. It made him realize that he wanted something different than that.”
Tinch enrolled at Coffeyville Community College in Kansas for the fall semester with hopes of running track in 2021. But it wasn’t long before he realized he was not ready to be back in school and he withdrew from his classes and returned home.
“I just wasn’t in a great place at that time,” Tinch said of his emotional state. “I just felt like going home was the best thing for me to do.”
Tinch spent the better part of the next two years working as a salesperson for U.S. Cellular and giving few thoughts to competing in track and field again. But around August of last year, former Kansas roommate and teammate Treyvon Ferguson contacted Tinch and asked him if he would be interested in reviving his career at Pittsburg State, where Ferguson was looking to transfer.
Ferguson had finished 10th in the NCAA Championships in the triple jump as a Kansas freshman in 2019. And after COVID-19 canceled the NCAA Indoor Championships in 2020 and wiped out the outdoor season entirely, Ferguson eventually ended up at Coffeyville and won the National Junior College Athletic Association Division I title as a sophomore last year.
He and Tinch had developed a tight enough bond at Kansas that when Ferguson asked him if he would be interested in coming to Pittsburg State, Tinch said he would only do so if they went there as a package deal.
Tinch did not know if that was an outrageous request on his part, but it turned out Ferguson had already mentioned him to Pittsburg State head coach Kyle Rutledge and jumps coach Jesse Miller. Before long Tinch was in communication with the two of them discussing the possibility of him enrolling in classes and competing for the Gorillas during the spring semester that began in the middle of January.
Despite all the good vibes he was getting from Pittsburg State and the thought of competing again, Tinch admits he had doubts about his abilities after being away from track and field for so long.
“I was still trying to get over that mental hump,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I could still compete at that level.”
Nonetheless, he made the decision to come to Pittsburg State shortly after Ferguson called him to let him know he was on campus.
“When Trey said he was here, I was like, Well, I told him if he was there, I would go,” Tinch said.
Tinch worked his final day at U.S. Cellular shortly after that, and though he was confident he had made the right decision to go back to school, he received some much-needed confirmation when he told his mom — whom he refers to as his best friend and confidante — about what was happening.
“The joy that was on her face, literally told me everything I needed to know,” Tinch said. “That was all I needed to see.”
Tinch’s mom was 16 years old when she gave birth to Cordell shortly after her sophomore year of high school. She initially tried to raise him while continuing to attend classes during her junior year, but that eventually proved to be too much for her and she dropped out of school before later earning her high school diploma through the General Education Development (GED) program.
“To be honest, it was all about the academics,” she said when asked her reaction to his return to school. “And the reason I say that is athletics for him is a natural talent… It’s never been an issue for him. He’s always been an athletic kid, but by the same token, everyone gets old, and the body parts don’t always work as well as they once did. And yes, I know you can say college is always going to be there, but sometimes the mind’s not there… [His athletic success] is definitely the cherry on top of the pie, or cake, or whatever the case may be. But getting a college education was the most important thing.”
While Rutledge and Miller were aware of Tinch’s accomplishments during his freshman year at Kansas, Rutledge said it didn’t take them long to realize that they had “something special” in him.
Though Tinch’s physical abilities impressed them, Rutledge said it was his “kinesthetic awareness” that made them stop and pause.
“You can tell him something one time, he can think about it and process it, and then he’ll be able to do it within a rep or two. Most often he’ll do it on his first draft. It’s just awesome and amazing to watch it. Someone who can do that and control their body that way.”
When asked if he had ever before coached an athlete such as Tinch, Rutledge quickly said no, and added, “There’s not a whole lot of coaches in the world who have coached someone like that.”
Because of Tinch’s ability to pick up things so quickly, Rutledge and Miller felt like they could take their time in letting him work his way into top shape as the season progressed.
Not that his performances suffered. Amongst his notable efforts during the indoor season was a time of 7.50 seconds in the 60-meter high hurdles, the fastest collegiate time in the nation this year at any level and a mark that moved him into a tie for seventh on the all-time collegiate performer list.
His outdoor season got off to an inauspicious start in the Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays when he finished 14th in the long jump with a leap of 7.50 (24-7¾) and ninth — and last — in the final of high hurdles with a time of 14.38.
Tinch had run a wind-aided 13.33 to win his qualifying heat. And he was leading the final after the first seven hurdles, but he lost much of his momentum after he smacked the eighth and ninth barriers in the 10-barrier race.
A lot of athletes, including Tinch during his freshman year at Kansas, would have been upset about running poorly in a final after such a promising run in the heat. But after tending to some soreness in his right ankle immediately after the race, he said he was one of the happiest people at the meet because he knew he was headed to a very fast time before he clobbered those two hurdles.
“Watching the video back and realizing what we had the potential of running was the biggest takeaway from that race,” Tinch said. “I attribute my reaction to my newfound mindset about the way I look at things now. Because if I had had that race back in 2018 or 2019, I would have been upset and frustrated. I wouldn’t have looked at the positive side of it.”
He had grown up and matured in the last couple of years and realized “I had to start looking at the bright side of things and not thinking everything was against me,” he said.
Less than two weeks after the Texas Relays, Tinch lowered his personal best to 13.32 to win the Cal State Los Angeles Twilight Open. Two days later he ran a wind-aided 13.22 to win the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in nearby Walnut.
Then came wind-aided times of 13.07 and 12.97 in the heats and final of the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics Association Championships on May 6 and 7 before he ran a personal best of 13.21 in a qualifying heat of the NCAA Division II meet. He followed that with a winning wind-aided time of 12.87 in the final, but it was hard to ignore the fact that the aiding breeze of 6.0 meters-per-second was triple the maximum of 2.0 allowed for record purposes.
All of those fast wind-aided times led to some online chatter questioning how good Tinch really was. But at some point, his mom said Cordell received an unsolicited Twitter message from Grant Holloway, the two-time defending World champion in the high hurdles. In that tweet, his mom said Holloway, whom she excitedly referred to as The Man, “had said to not worry about things, telling [Cordell] he couldn’t control what he couldn’t control. He said that of course people are going to holler about it, but don’t worry about it. Just keep doing it.”
Rutledge gave Tinch a week off after the Division II meet to go home and “decompress,” and things really began to click in training after he came back to Pittsburg State. In addition, Tinch got some fuel added to his competitive fires when he was removed from the list of 10 men’s semifinalists for The Bowerman. The award is named after former Oregon Coach Bill Bowerman and it honors the top collegiate male and female track and field athlete in the U.S. each year.
Just days after the NCAA published The Bowerman watch list without Tinch’s name on it, he lowered his personal best to 13.09 in a qualifying heat of the Trackwired Grand Prix at the University of Arkansas. Then came his 12.96 bomb in the final about an hour later.
Not surprisingly, Doyle Management announced last week that it had signed Tinch to a professional contract, with company president Paul Doyle stating in a release that “Cordell has an unbelievable story and a once-in-a-generation type talent. I can see him being one of the greatest all-around athletes to ever compete in the sport.”
Despite those heady words, Tinch confirmed in a text that his goals for the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships are the same now as they were just hours before he became the 24th man — and 14th American — in history to break 13 seconds in the high hurdles.
“I’m a person that likes to think big and dream big, because if you don’t set your sights high, then you’re limiting yourself,” he said then. “So my goals are to make the USA team in both events.”