“IT WAS A LONG TIME before it came up,” says Zacchaeus Brocks of the wait to see who won the 110 hurdles at the USATF U20 Championships. “I kind of had a gut feeling that I had won.”
Then it flashed on the board. The 18-year-old high school senior had indeed won. And not just that: he had run faster than any high schooler in history. The wind reading, a negligible 0.5, meant that he would be forever known as the first prep to break the 13-second barrier.
Two feelings hit him: “Relief — the built-up tension that you put on yourself when you have weeks of having to go out there and perform. And the sense of victory—realizing all the work I put in to get to that moment, despite all the hardships and the challenges that I went through. Being able to come out on top, it was an exceptional moment.”
In a sport of big talkers and big celebrators, Brocks falls on the humble side of the game. Outside, he looked as if he took it all in stride. Inside, it’s a safe bet that emotions ran high, and much of that had to do with the injury that blew up the most important part of his junior year.
It was the first big setback he had experienced in a career that goes back a surprisingly long way. He was already a veteran of several seasons when he won the AAU Junior Olympic Triathlon in the summer before fifth grade.
The next summer, his coach at the Motor City Track Club, Vernon Lynch, suggested he try the hurdles. That year he won the 80-meter event at JO’s. By the time he joined the program at Detroit Catholic Central High School, he had plenty of experience. He ran 14.94 over the 39-inch hurdles as a ninth grader.
As a 16-year-old soph he made remarkable gains, finishing 7th in the Nike Indoor 60 hurdles. Outdoors he hit 13.73, placing 7th in the U20 Nationals and 2nd at Nike Outdoor.
In his junior campaign, he finished 2nd at the Nike Indoor in a PR 7.72 for 60 hurdles. Outdoors he improved to 13.69. Then the injury hit. A stress fracture in his toe sidelined him for the big meets, his state finals, nationals.
“It was hard,” he admits. “I’m not going to lie. It was really hard. I had a lot of ‘why me?’ moments, a lot of times where I didn’t know what was happening. But I think God set me out for something better. I knew he had something better for me, so I just stayed humble. Just kept praying and kept believing in myself.”
Once he got the medical green light, the work continued. Brocks draws his coaching guidance from a varied team: Ann Arbor’s Michael David Johnson and Indiana’s Jeff Williams on hurdles, Hannukkah Wallace on sprinting. Then during the school season, there was the Catholic Central staff, led by Tony Magni with hurdle/sprint assistant Tiberia Patterson.
The ’26 season showed that all the work was paying off. Indoors Brocks went undefeated over hurdles, winning the New Balance Nationals with a stunningly big margin (0.28) in 7.44, the No. 2 time ever. Outdoors, like the rest of the sprinter/hurdlers in Michigan, he was hampered by weather that couldn’t be called ideal until after the state finals had passed. At his conference meet he ran a windy 13.26. Then, in the heats of the state finals, he flew to a 13.29 PR. The final might have even been a better performance, but a 2.4 headwind held him to a 13.40 — with the biggest winning margin in the meet’s 132-year history.
He did his part to help Catholic Central in its quest to win its first track state title, anchoring the winning 4×1 and capturing the 300 hurdles in 36.33. The Shamrocks finished 2nd by a mere point.
A week later, Brocks used a tune-up meet at Oak Park to improve to 13.19 (into a 0.8 headwind). The next day, he said he saw the High School Record of 13.08 as being achievable. “It’s all about executing the right race plan.”
And breaking 13? “One of my coaches says whenever you achieve your dream, dream another dream. So whenever I do some of the things that I’m dreaming about, I just always dream about something bigger. And that sub-13 is one of those goals that I dream about a lot.”
Before Eugene, the 6-1/165 (1.86/75) Brocks had somehow managed to stay under the national radar a bit. The pre-meet release from USATF tabbed the 110s as one of the races to watch and named 5 contenders without mentioning Brocks. Not the sort of thing that bothers him. “I just knew I had to stay calm and, you know, do what I do and just run.”
In his heat, he lined up against Georgia frosh Le’Ezra Brown (a 13.22 PR over 42-inchers) and Indiana prep Rylan Hainje (13.16 best, plus a 13.05 with no wind gauge). Hainje false-started. In the do-over, Brown streaked across the line first in 12.95, a U20 American Record.
Says Brooks, “I finished 2nd… I knew it was going to be fast, but I didn’t expect it to be that fast.” His 13.00 sliced 0.08 off the HSR. “When I saw the time I was pretty shocked.”
The finals were scheduled to go less than an hour later. “I didn’t really have time to warm up or anything. The most I could do was get my spikes off and walk around a little bit. Coming off of that [13.00], I just knew I couldn’t make any big adjustments because doing that could throw off different parts of my race. What I was really thinking about was just staying calm and executing the race plan.
“I knew that I had it in me to win because I knew some of the stuff that I did wrong in the prelims and I knew that if I could just fix a few of those things — not even really focusing on them, but just kind of letting the race come to me, I knew that I could do something big.”
He and Brown started in lanes 4 and 5 respectively, with Texas State’s Ja’Shaun Lloyd in 6. From the start, no one backed down. “I felt both of them right next to me, so I was like, ‘Alright, let me get up on the hurdles. Come on, let me just get to the line.’ And when I leaned, it was kind of more of a momentum lean, where I didn’t actually dip, but I was running, I was running, I was running, and I kind of let my body go.”
It was enough. Brocks prevailed by 0.002 over Brown. His 12.98 broke his own short-lived HSR.
Bound for Ohio State in the fall, where he plans to study engineering, Brocks has 6 weeks to prepare for the World U20 Championships on the same track.
“First off,” he says of his plans, “just a few days of rest and recovery, letting my body get back from the wear and tear. After that, the same thing as before, working on the minor details and the minor things that I can fix. I’m not even looking for anything big, no big changes, just focusing on the little things that I can work on that will benefit me in the long run.”
As he said before the U20 meet, “It’s just about focusing on the technique and the execution part of it, which is what I’ve been focusing on this whole season. And we see it coming together later on into the season rather than earlier due to weather and everything like that. But I’m proud of myself for how far I’ve come so far, and I know there’s even higher levels that I’m going to achieve.”
Of his season to this point, he simply says, “It’s just a blessing. I had a great time. I had a fun time.”
