A Champion’s New Challenge

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — As 2025 ended, few lists detailing the year’s most compelling sports moments included the women’s 800-meter final in the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships. Which is only to say there were a great many incomplete lists.

The final stretch of the race in Geneva, Ohio, was as enthralling as anything the Olympics or World Championships can offer — as enthralling as athletic competition gets. In fifth place as she began the final lap, Elizabethtown College’s Kelty Oaster was on the leader’s shoulder entering the final 200 meters. She lost a step on the final curve, but clawed the deficit back, inch by inch, as the two sprinted down the home stretch. She pulled level with perhaps 10 meters to go and thrust her torso forward as the runners crossed the line.

She won the national championship by two hundredths of a second: 2:05.09 to 2:05.11.

A little more than two months earlier, she won the indoor national title in the 800 by .15 seconds. That’s a blink of the eye, literally. But .02 seconds? That’s infinitesimal.

Oaster usually has some internal monologue during a race, but as best she can remember, she zoned out for much of the outdoor final. What she does remember was, in effect, cramming for an exam over those final meters, mentally reviewing the nuances of how to lean at the finish line. A motivational pep talk wasn’t going to do much.

“It was more technical — I wasn’t going to be able to make my body go any faster than it was going,” Oaster recalled with a laugh. “So I was just trying to figure out how to get there first. I’m not usually in a position where I’m leaning at the line. I’m not a sprinter who has do that all the time. I was just trying to remind myself to do that, basically, and that I’m going to have to do my best to get my shoulders across.”

Knowing exactly how much each fraction of a second can count, no wonder she’s still looking for ways to go faster and be better. The race in Ohio could have been the fifth-year senior’s farewell to track and field. Instead, as the current NCAA indoor season heats up and thoughts turn, too, to winter’s eventual ebb and a new outdoor season, the best 800-meter runner in Division III a year ago is taking on the best conference in college athletics as a Vanderbilt graduate student and track and field student-athlete.

Already, she’s clocked the fourth-fastest indoor times in Vanderbilt history in the 1,000 and 800 meters — the latter faster than her championship-winning performance a year ago.

“I was coming off of a really good season, and I knew that I wasn’t really quite at my potential yet,” Oaster said of coming to Vanderbilt and the SEC.  “I definitely wanted to continue on in some way. So the SEC training environment didn’t really scare me, because I was looking for something that would challenge me.”

Giving the Competition a Head Start

Oaster didn’t start running competitively until high school, something of an outlier in this age of highly organized and stratified youth sports. Growing up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as the oldest of three sisters (one now plays soccer at Roanoke College and another runs at Elon University), she used her speed on the soccer field and basketball court. Needing another outlet after she lost her passion for basketball, she tried track as a high school freshman. Within a year, she had given up soccer, too, to make room for cross country.

Already a later starter, she encountered another obstacle in the form of a global pandemic that disrupted high school sports, among so much else. The world shut down during her senior year, prime recruiting time. She drew interest from some low-major Division I programs in the region but didn’t find a fit that felt right. She instead chose Elizabethtown, a little more than 50 miles from home, competing in both cross country and track and field.

“I didn’t have that last season to really showcase what I could still give,” Oaster said of high school. “My coach and I knew that I was going into things a little under trained and that my ceiling was going to be a lot higher. But I was OK with going to a D-III school and being able to get out of it whatever I put into it.”

Records tumbled almost as soon as she arrived, all-conference honors and national championship qualification following in short order. Shaking off an injury-marred third season, she truly hit her stride, so to speak, in 2024, earning All-America honors and finishing fifth in the 800 during the outdoor season. That set up her national championship double as a fifth-year student-athlete, a year that also saw her break school and conference records anew in the 400 and 1,500 meters, as well as the 800 meters.

Oaster won races. A lot of races — the dramatic closing kick for the national title her crowning achievement at Elizabethtown. But that moment, the Hollywood ending, also obscures what propelled her forward. She likes that track and field, certainly at the college level, still has a team dynamic. Some of her best performances over the years have come when she knows teammates in a relay are counting on her — including some strong efforts this season with Vandy’s indoor distance medley team. But at least part of what she first loved about running was the self-reliance. It’s also why she was content in Division III. Competing was, as she said, about whatever she put into it. It’s the fine line between competing against everyone else on the start line and competing against your own limits.

“It’s obviously nice to be able to cross the finish line first,” Oaster allowed. “But it still feels really rewarding to finish a race, maybe middle of the pack, and get a really good time for yourself. It feels good to see the improvement. I think that’s a nice thing about running. Regardless of how anyone else around you is doing, you can see your own improvements through your times. I think that can be just as motivating as winning a race.

“But it’s nice to have a mix of both.”

Her Closing Kick

At Vanderbilt, where she’s enrolled in the Owen Graduate School of Management’s Master of Marketing program, she found somewhere to test those limits while lining up against the very best in college track and field. Vanderbilt assistant coach Lisa Morgan, one of director of track and field and cross country Althea Thomas’ distance gurus and a Team USA coach, spoke at length with both Oaster and her Elizabethtown coaches to get a sense of how she trained and what she wanted out of a new experience — and to encourage her to aim even higher.

“They were pretty big goals,” Oaster allowed. “But I think that was good. I wanted someone who saw my potential and didn’t just see me as who I was in the moment.”

Shedding her cross country duties allowed Oaster to focus all her energy to track training in the fall. The 800 is a grueling race caught somewhere between distance and sprint and thus demanding attention to both endurance and speed training. Oaster has done more weight lifting than ever before, for example, her confidence growing along with her strength. Across the board, she feels her growth curve accelerating. Like the championship race last spring, she’s ready for her closing kick as a collegiate runner.

The site of her memorable finale last May, Geneva is only a few hours from the Elizabethtown campus. After winning her title, Oaster grabbed an early dinner with some family members and a couple of teammates and then drove back to school with the coach. No fireworks, minimal fuss. Not exactly a movie-script ending to her Hollywood moment. But it was fitting. Even if she didn’t yet know it would be in Nashville, she knew that triumph wasn’t the end of the story. She won a race. A big race. But she had more to give.

When it comes to exploring the limits of her own potential, she’s ready to lean for the line.

“The goal is to get as close as we can,” Oaster said. “It’s kind of hard to say exactly what my ceiling is or exactly where we’re going to get to this year. But I think I could get pretty close.”