IN A SPORT WHERE most athletes would call themselves competitive, Tinoda Matsatsa takes it to another level. For the 20-year-old Georgetown soph, it’s a major personality trait.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I love, love winning and competing.”
It started to show when he was a kid, forced into middle school cross country by his mom, who ran when she was a child in Zimbabwe. Initially, Matsatsa was not wild about running. “I didn’t really enjoy it, but I won every race for my first year. I beat some guy in our division that was apparently one of the really good ones.
“I was like, ‘I’m just doing this because I have to.’ And then in my 8th-grade year, I thought, ‘I guess this is OK, but I just want to do it for the season and then get it over with and go back to soccer.’”
But the more he ran, the more success he found. For a while, he tried doing both track and soccer. Then he got hurt while trying to please two sports. He zeroed in on track. “That’s when I started to actually dial in and run,” he says.
From a 4:49.87 as a frosh in the 1600, he improved to 1:54.44 and 4:15.57 as a soph. The next year he transferred to St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Potomac, Maryland, and he improved his 1600 to 4:10.93. As a senior, he took on a heady goal, to become the first Black high schooler to break the 4:00 barrier.
He was worried that Devan Kipyego, his rival in Rhode Island (now at Iowa State), would get there first. Kipyego had run 4:00.64 the previous year. “Every time he raced the mile, I was like, ‘Please don’t break 4:00, please don’t break 4:00!’”
Finally, after what felt like an easy 4:05.68 at the end of April, Matsatsa felt ready. While during much of the season he primarily focused on the 800 (a 1:49.48 best at that point), he lined up for the prep mile at the HOKA Festival of Miles in St. Louis. He set out to run negative splits and did so, finishing 3rd in the deepest prep mile of all time, his 3:58.70 giving him the sub-4:00.
He returned his focus to the 800 then, taking 4th at Brooks PR (1:48.50 PR) and winning New Balance (1:47.61 PR) and USATF Juniors (1:47.76). He earned the No. 1 nod on our end-of-year High School All-America team.
As a frosh at Georgetown working with coach Brandon Bonsey, Matsatsa had hoped to continue dabbling in the 1500/mile, but after missing an early season race, found himself focusing almost entirely on the 800 after setting an indoor Collegiate Record at 1000 (2:18.05). The resulting season allowed him to taste both the highs and the lows.
The Big East runner-up indoors, he was unable to get out of the NCAA heats. Outdoors proved even more frustrating. He placed 7th in the Big East 800, but at the East Regional did not advance despite a PR 1:46.75. “It was heartbreaking. I knew I was good enough to go.”
Matsatsa kept looking ahead. “I didn’t let that get me down.” A week later at the Penn Relays Summer Showcase, he ran 2nd to Kenya’s Festus Lagat with a PR 1:45.17. That primed him for the Olympic Trials, where he improved again, running a best of 1:45.12 to become at 19 the youngest man in the final.
Of his 9th-place finish in 1:45.70, he says, “Of course, I didn’t make it to the Olympics, but it was a great experience coming off not making it to the NCAAs and then making the Trials final.”
Matsatsa confesses his frosh year left him hungry. “I wanted to do more. I wanted to be first team All-America and make it to the NCAA final indoors and outdoors. My training was perfect. I was in the weightroom getting stronger as well, something I didn’t do in high school. The season left me wanting way more than I produced.”
Cue the ’25 campaign. It started auspiciously enough, with a December mile of 3:54.15, a PR in his first race at the distance in a year and a half. “It’s a good starting point,” he says, “but if I run it again, I want to run way faster.”
Then came the Nittany Lion Challenge at Penn State on January 18. Matsatsa wanted to go faster than the 2:18.05 Collegiate Record he had set a year earlier at Virginia Tech. “It didn’t go as planned,” he says, “because we got out slow. After the first 200 (27.88 for the leader) we picked it back up. I was like, ‘OK, if we can stay on this pace…’ After the pacer dropped off, I was going to make a move on my teammates with 350 left. I came through the 800 in 1:49.54, which was slower than I wanted. The last 200, I just poured it all out there. I really had way more energy than I should have in the last 800, so I pushed even more.”
The result, a 2:16.84, took down the record by 1.21 seconds. “It wasn’t really a surprise,” he says. “My workouts over the fall were better and faster than they were last year. And I am also stronger, since I have also been training for the mile.”
Obviously, Matsatsa, a computer science major, has found his stride at Georgetown. “It’s perfect. The training all flows together very nicely. Training with the team makes it a whole lot easier and more fun.”
(Subsequent to the web publication of this article, at the Hemery Valentine Invitational [Boston, February 14] Matsatsa lowered the indoor American Collegiate Record for 800 to 1;45.21, cutting 0.03 from Brandon Miller’s standard from ’22.)
Looking ahead, Matsatsa predicts we’ll see more of him in the 800 this year, though the 1500 is now solidly on the table for the future. “I just gotta take it one step at a time and progress how I progress and everything will fall into place at the right time for me because usually it does. But I just want to be patient with it and not try to rush it too quickly. I’m going to take it one step at a time and place little milestones on the way to those goals, so I’m always working towards something.”
