She was a star athlete at Herriman High School with 16 state titles in track and field. Kaysha Love was also named the Gatorade Athlete of the Year her senior year at Herriman High. Now, her drive, tenacity, work ethic and natural ability has Kaysha going for a gold medal in bobsled at the 2022 Winter Olympics.
On this episode of the Supercast, Kaysha Love joins us from the Olympic Village in Beijing, China to talk about how her experiences at Herriman High School, along with a fierce, competitive nature prepared her for competing on the world stage. It is an inspiring conversation with Kaysha that you don’t want to miss.
Audio Transcription
Anthony Godfrey:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. She was a star athlete at Herriman High School with 16 state titles in track and field. Kaysha Love was also named the Gatorade athlete of the year her senior year at Herriman High. Now her drive, tenacity, work ethic and natural ability have Kaysha going for a gold medal in bobsled at the 2022 Winter Olympics. On this episode of the Supercast, Kaysha Love joins us virtually from the Olympic Village in Beijing, China. She talks to us about how her experiences at Herriman High School, along with a fierce competitive nature, prepared her for competing on the world stage. It is an inspiring conversation with Kaysha that you don't want to miss.
We are excited to have Kaysha Love on the Supercast today, an Olympic athlete and a graduate of Herriman High School. Kaysha, thanks for joining us.
Kaysha Love:
Absolutely. Thank you. It's an honor to be even on your guys' podcast. I'm so excited to take you guys along on my journey here in Beijing.
Anthony Godfrey:
And you are in Beijing, that's pretty incredible. And you are hours away from being part of Opening Ceremonies. How does that feel?
Kaysha Love:
It's so surreal. I will say I've been out here for about a week now and like, up to this point, everything kind of just felt unreal. Like, it didn't really hit me that we were at the Olympics and yesterday I actually got my first experience to have an unofficial training. I got my first training runs on the Olympic track and that's when it finally hit me. And then this morning when I woke up, I just realized like, today's the day, it's Opening Ceremony day. This is a day I've been waiting for for so long. And it's just like one of the many steps, and one of the things that has just been in my goals and in my prayers and to actually finally have the day be here is just, it's such an exciting feeling. And then on top of it, in LA we had team processing where we were able to try on our gear and it kind of gave us a little taste of what the Opening ceremonies was. So trying on the gear there was just so exciting. So I'm very excited to be in Opening Ceremonies and wear that beautiful fit.
Anthony Godfrey:
That's exciting. And you get to keep it?
Kaysha Love:
Yeah, we get to keep it. Yeah.
Anthony Godfrey:
One of your many souvenirs. That's pretty awesome. So tell me, what have they talked to you about leading up to Opening Ceremonies? What kind of instructions have you received about that?
Kaysha Love:
So, I mean, there's definitely lots of different things that I think that other Olympic games didn't have to necessarily deal with, with the exception of the 2020 games. There's lots of COVID protocols that we have to follow. We're constantly getting PCR tested. That's an everyday daily COVID test that we're all required to do. And then with Opening Ceremonies, we’re required to take an additional COVID test before and after leaving all of our separate Olympic Villages. And then getting there, they've also kind of broke down little sections of like, ‘Hey, we have like snack things here. It's gonna be a long day.’ But they're just really emphasizing like the mask protocols and making sure that you're remaining positive on all the COVID regulations.
Anthony Godfrey:
Tell us about some of the technical aspects of a run. How far do you run when you're just starting out, how fast you get going?
Kaysha Love:
So it honestly just depends on the track. So each track, like we mentioned earlier, is a little bit different than the next. There's not one track in the world that's identical to the following one. So like sprinting behind the sled and pushing the sled on Park City's ramp is probably close to only like a low five seconds versus like Lake Placid where you're looking at like six seconds. So it just kind of just depends on the actual force. Sprinting is like my background. I tend to do a little bit better on courses like Park City, where that curve appears a lot faster. Like that curve starts at like five meters versus like Lake Placid that curve, that crust comes around like 18 meters. And so just kind of differs on that.
As far as our roles, I'm the brake woman. So for women, we only compete in Monobob and Two Man. So Monobob is just one person and that's just the pilot. And then the other discipline is Two Man and my pilot's in front and then I'm in the back as the brake woman. Basically my job and my duties as a brake woman are to accelerate the sled as fast as possible to get us the fastest velocities. The track doesn't get necessarily like faster or slower at the end of the track. Like all the speed that you've generated comes from the very top of the track. Like you can't jump out in the middle of the track, start trying to push again or try to magically find some extra speed somewhere. All the speed and all the times that you're getting is genuinely coming from that push time. So my job is to give my pilot the best opportunity with the best speeds to potentially put down some really good numbers at the end of track.
Once I load into the sled, like then my job is basically like a relay. Like I pass it on to my pilot and she drives down our tracks. And like we mentioned earlier, each track's different. So it's her job to study all the lines of all the different tracks and to make sure that she's fully aware of what lines will be the fastest, what runners to use, how to like efficiently go about the track. And then once you pass the finish line, it's kind of my job as well, to be aware of where we're at in the track. I like to count the curves, it helps me know where we're at, so I can kind of move one with the sled and one with my pilot. At end of the course as the brake women, it's our job to pull the brakes. So there's no brakes in the front of the sled. So if I don't pull the brakes, the sled doesn't stop. So, yep, my job is to accelerate it, get as fast velocities and pull the brakes at the end.
Anthony Godfrey:
Now I never realized that you would really just be passing it off to the pilot. That you do your part of the start, and then it's up to her to guide you from there.
Kaysha Love:
Basically. Yeah.
Anthony Godfrey:
Do you use the brakes at all during the race?
Kaysha Love:
Absolutely not. No, no, no.
Anthony Godfrey:
I bet you know what I would do, I would have my hand on the brake the entire time. I’d probably be like those poor kids at the water slide who get caught in between the hills and have to be rescued down in the middle. You know, they have the sled team coming down to get me to the bottom of the hill.
Kaysha Love:
For sure.
Anthony Godfrey:
So that's a lot of pressure. You've got to make all of that happen within just a few seconds at the start. And like you said, that's fascinating. There's no making it up if there's not a good start. You're in tough shape.
Kaysha Love:
Yeah, absolutely.
Anthony Godfrey:
Stay with us. When we come back more with former Herriman High track star and Olympic athlete, Kaysha Love.
Break:
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Anthony Godfrey:
Now you were a sprinter and a gymnast before becoming an Olympic athlete in the Bobsled and you ran at Herriman, so tell me about Herriman's role in your getting here and just your journey through those three sports.
Kaysha Love:
First, I'll say go Mustangs. Once a Mustang always a Mustang. Yeah, I'll start with gymnastics. So I did gymnastics for 12 years, it was my passion. That was just some thing that I was just, I don't wanna say, like born into, but basically like born into. When you do gymnastics that long, like that's kind of all you know. So I ended up quitting gymnastics at the end of my, well, beginning of my freshman year of high school. I kind of just was continuing to get injured a lot. And I was just going through a lot of injuries that like a lot of athletes shouldn't have to endure. I was missing a lot of seasons. Like I would go my whole gymnastics of just looking strong, getting new skills, getting recruited by colleges. And then as soon as it came time to compete and showcase all the hard work I had been doing in the fall, I would have some crazy random injury or like an injury that would keep me out for like several months. And that became frustrating having to restart that cycle of being injured, doing really well in the pre-season and then season coming and not being able to actually showcase that stuff. So that was kind of taking a toll on me and I was training like 30 hours a week in this sport. I just didn't have time for friends or a social life.
And then starting high school, I had just kind of told my mom like, ‘Hey, I'm scared to start high school. Like, I don't have friends.’ Like all of my gym friends lived in the Bountiful area or Draper or just like Salt Lake City. I didn't have any friends who were gonna be in my high school and I was kind of nervous about it. And so she kind of just mentioned like, ‘you know, this might be like a good chance, an opportunity for you to take on a new opportunity, a new sport. So how about we just try track? I'm not asking you to give up gymnastics, but how about we just try both?’ And so I went out and tried track at Herriman and I loved it. I loved the social aspect of it. I actually liked the workouts and the competition and just running and feeling like free in that sense. And so that's when I started taking on track. Then it was my first season at Herriman when I broke the 100M state record. From that point forward, like the entire four years being there, Herriman just had a stacked track team. Like we were state champions in basically every event. We were state champions in the sprint events. We were state champions in the distance and throws events and even had some top three medalists in all the jumping events too. So our track team was just incredible, like as a whole.
Looking back at those years, I really owe a lot of my success and a lot of like who I am as a person to my high school coach. Coach Fletcher was somebody who at that moment in time was like my father figure. He was like a coach who believed in me and was kind of being like a pillar of showing me what it was to be a successful athlete. How it was to kind of like excel in life period and also to be like a very faithful and spiritual person and to kind of just be who it is that you wanna be. Then just the support at Herriman was just unreal. Like when I look back at the high school experience, just the things that they did for not only like myself, but for like our track team and for like the athletes at Herriman was just unreal.
Like I remember there was a time where our head coach, Coach Garlick, he created a photo shoot. And that was just so like kind of unheard of for the high schools at that time. Nobody was doing photo shoots for the track and field athletes. Like for football, of course, like basketball, sure. Those are like our big revenue sports. But for a photo shoot for track athletes, it's kind of just like a different thing. So we did this photo shoot and we show up at Herriman like a week later and draped from the football stadium is this huge, like 50 feet by 50 feet, track and field banner that just had our whole track team showcased on this huge banner on the back of the football stadium. They just made it so memorable and then for us to be like a fairly new high school when I was there, it was like, the experience was incredible and I wouldn't have changed it for the world.
Anthony Godfrey:
Exciting to hear what a great influence those coaches were on you. It's no surprise, but you know, they don't know in the moment, just the impact they have. The lasting impact in the life of a student and in the life of an athlete. So that's exciting to hear.
Kaysha Love:
Yeah. Like I'm still in very close contact with all the coaches that I like worked with in high school. I still communicate with them to this day. Like I get weekly text messages from nearly all of them that coached me. And it genuinely just means like the world to me, because they were like huge, impactful people to me. And just to know that they continue to support me no matter what journey and endeavor I take them on, whether it was gymnastics or track or now bobsled. They've just been like very supportful people and villages and pillars in my life. It takes a village to accomplish some of the things that I'm trying to accomplish and going back from family to high school coaches to the school and Herriman as a community to my colleges, like people have just been like incredible support systems for me.
Anthony Godfrey:
Tell me about the support you felt as you found out that you were going to be competing in the Olympics and just leading up to that. From Herriman, from coaches, from friends, from family. Tell me about what that support's been like.
Kaysha Love:
Well the whole journey, like people were just very excited and very hopeful and wishful from like the second I was starting my rookie camp. They were just like, ‘oh my gosh, we're trying this Olympic sport. Like you get a chance to be around like the Olympic USA bobsled team. Like you could have a chance of being in the Olympics one day.’ And like back in October, I was just kind of like, ‘yeah, I've never been a bobsled’, but yeah, it's exciting. It's an honor to be around all these athletes, but we're just gonna kind of take it day by day. And then as the World Cup started to progress this season, I just started seeing so many like family and friends just kind of come out of the woodwork, and family and friends who have been there through all just kind of telling me like how proud they were and how excited they were. And just kind of like enlightening me on the type of growth that I've had as like a person and an athlete and like the experiences that I was sharing with them and how like I was handling things and the things that like God was paving for me. It was just a very emotional and very exciting experience.
Especially for like my mom who's been there from everything. My mom never missed one gymnastics meet. She really didn't even miss any gymnastics practices. Like she was juggling her full-time job, my 30 hour practices and somehow magically able to go to work and watch my practices and go to the competitions and just never, never missed a single thing. And then for us to go into high school track, she was at every track meet. Rain, shine, snow, whatever it was. She was out there with a little heater buddy and her blanket, her and my grandma, just everything. They didn't miss a single thing.
And they were also there for all the downs that we've had too. And there've been so many things in just my life as a whole that I had to like learn to get through and conquer. There were a lot of journeys and stuff that I had to figure out what it is I wanted for myself. And there were a lot of down moments and my mom and my grandma were always there for all of it. So for them to see like all of our hard work, like it wasn't even just my hard work, it was theirs too. Like my whole family made sacrifices and like this dream became our dream. So for me to call them just in tears, when I figured out I was going to the Olympics is probably very, so emotional for all of us. We just cried and cried and realized that we were like one step closer to like achieving the things that we all felt and worked so hard for.
Then coming back to Bobsled, like people are surprised like,’ ‘oh, like a year and a half of being in the sport. That's such a short time to now magically become like an Olympian.’ And the way I see it is like, I've been training for this for the last eight years, for sure. Because I feel like track really transitions really well into bobsled. And I just didn't realize I was training for bobsled in these eight years. I just thought I was running track and trying to be the most successful track athlete I could be. Little did I know that all of those experiences and journeys and lessons were not for that moment, but they were for the moment I'm doing and living in now.
Especially like being in the moment today, I look back and yeah, all those things that I wondered why this happened or how did it happen like this? Or like I wanted it to plan out like this and it didn't, I couldn't figure out why. And now looking back, like I'm like it had to work out like that. Like God had to plan because things had to fall in motion and had to be prepared for the moment I'm living in today. And those family and friends, especially like my mom and my grandma, but my whole family, honestly, they were there for every step of it. So they, for anybody, genuinely knows how hard and all the sacrifice and emotions and things that it took for us to get here.
Anthony Godfrey:
I love that you found your Olympic path in your third sport. I've always thought, you know, those three sport athletes, can you just throw me one of them? You've got one to spare, give me one. How proud are you to be walking in the Opening Ceremonies representing the United States of America?
Kaysha Love:
So proud. Honestly, our country is incredible and the amount of just hard work that not only the athletes, but just like the people who keep our country afloat and running and just all those things are just incredible stuff. That I can even put myself in that category of representing our country. And I'm not just representing our country as a whole, but I'm representing myself and my family and my friends and the cities that supported me. And like all these, all these people, like it's a village that got us here and it's just gonna be like a very overwhelming feeling. And I'm just incredibly proud that our selection committee has selected me to be that person that represents our country and the sport of Bobsled. Like it's honestly just an honor. And to just be like a part of this incredible experience is just something that I can't even like fathom to put into words.
I will say that coming into Opening Ceremonies is like, I'm not even like allowing myself to kind of put up like, ‘oh, it's gonna feel like this, or it's going to be like this.’ Like I genuinely just wanna take it in for what it is. Whether that emotion is like excitement or like tears of joy or just like straight proudness. I don't know what I'm gonna feel in that moment, but whatever it is, I'm going to feel like I just wanna have that genuine feeling of, ‘okay, I'm not putting any expectations on it. This is how this is meant to feel. And this is, this is where I'm meant to be.’ So I'm very excited to feel whatever emotion it is that I feel when I walk into that stadium tonight. But I'm excited for whatever is to come.
Anthony Godfrey:
It is a moment that's just gonna take over. It's gonna be what it'll be, cuz it's gonna be powerful.
Kaysha Love:
For sure. It is. It's gonna be so powerful.
Anthony Godfrey:
There's a lot that's led up to this. You've got a lot of people cheering you on. I will be screaming at the top of my lungs, that's for sure. So we're all really excited for you and I'm thrilled that you took the time to talk with me today. It's just so exciting to talk with you as Opening Ceremonies are just a few hours away and big moments for you are coming in just days. So congratulations on everything you've done to arrive at this moment and for who you are and all the support you have. Is there anyone you wanna shout out to before we finish?
Kaysha Love:
Honestly, just my whole family and I have to shout out my puppy. My puppy Angel she's she's been holding me down the whole eight years I've had her. She's incredible. She's my like emotional support puppy. I actually took her to like school with me and she came to some track meets. She always came to practice and yeah, she's doing great. My mom’s watching her right now.
Anthony Godfrey:
Could you outrun her? Can you outrun her?
Kaysha Love:
Actually, my puppy is fairly fast. There's times where I'm a little surprised, like, ‘okay, I'm kind of, I'm moving at a good pace and your little legs are keeping up’. Like she's impressive. And plus she's like 14 years old. So for her to be like, as old as she is and just killing these track workouts I take us on. She's incredible.
Anthony Godfrey:
That's cool.
Kaysha Love:
My puppy, my mom, my grandparents, my dad, my sisters, my sisters have been great role models and they've been amazing and yeah, just and all the other people that have supported me. Like I can't do it without any of them. Like all my friends, family.
Anthony Godfrey:
Well, I wish you the very best. Have a great time and we'll be watching, that's for sure.
Kaysha Love:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Anthony Godfrey:
You can cheer Kaysha on as she goes for gold in Women's Bobsled this Friday and Saturday, February 18th and 19th in Beijing. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Supercast. Remember education is the most important thing you'll do today. We'll see you out there.