Don’t Stay in Your Lane

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Vanderbilt sprinter Tina Benzinger knows what awaits when she slides her spikes into the starting blocks, almost down to the number of strides required to reach her destination. Track and field has a thousand nuances, but in at least that respect, her sport isn’t complicated. Get from start to finish as quickly—and directly—as you can.

Life is more circuitous. No lane markings guide the way. There’s no way of knowing how far you have to go. The journey may take you all the way from Bavaria to Middle Tennessee—from the Technical University of Munich to Vanderbilt. And that might only be the start.

Benzinger is an international student and graduate transfer in her first year with the Commodores, neither designation uncommon in contemporary college sports. Less familiar is that the German’s transatlantic move came late—only after she earned her undergraduate degree in health science from the Technical University of Munich.

It took her longer than many peers to decide she wanted to pursue track at an elite level. Along the way, she almost quit the sport. Now, competing against the best in the SEC and pursuing her master’s in human development studies from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, she’s making up for lost time. As sprinters know, that isn’t easy. They train long hours to claw back small fractions of a second. For Benzinger, maximizing her potential meant taking a leap of faith on a new culture and intensely collaborative training environment.

Stepping beyond her comfort zone tested her. As evidenced by her personal best in the 200 meters during the SEC Indoor Track and Field Championships, the second fastest time in school history, the experiment has also been productive. At Vanderbilt, she found coaches and teammates who challenge and support her. She found people who understand why she’s driven to do what she does. It doesn’t matter where you come from or how you get there, some things translate in any language.

“You want to see how much you can get out of something when you put so much into it,” Benzinger said. “I experienced that here at Vanderbilt, running my personal best at SECs. It’s this feeling of working so hard for something. People always ask me ‘Why do you work out so much just to run for 11 seconds?’ Sometimes I feel like I really don’t know.

“But then once you have this moment on the track, and you see your time and what you achieved—and you put so much work in—you know why you’re doing it.”

Teammates like Kayleigh Stargell, middle, and Mya Georgiadis, right, have helped Benzinger unlock her best. 

From Nearly Quitting to Nashville

Benzinger played a variety of sports growing up, from tennis to skiing, but grew to love track most of all. It didn’t hurt that she was fast. Winning is fun, and she won as often as not against local competition. Still, track was as much pastime as passion. In her late teens, with university a year or two away, she thought it might have run its course, so to speak.

At about the same time, a coach she knew through a mutual acquaintance encouraged her to train with his club in Munich. Still enamored with the feeling of going fast, she gave it a try. He soon pulled her aside. She already knew she had talent, but he told her she had the potential to be elite—maybe even fast enough to represent Germany in international competition. If she was willing to commit to the work, she could get there.

She was soon regularly commuting an hour and a half to Munich each week to train. A year later, she moved to Munich full time to begin university and continue training with her coach. This was in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with most of her classwork taking place virtually. But far from hindering her athletic development, she found the unusual moment in time something of a leveler for an outsider on the track.

“Nobody knew me, I was so new to this track world,” said Benzinger, noting more established athletes struggled with the disruption to their established routines. “For me, it was a chance to use whatever opportunities and resources I had to become great. We didn’t have the facilities—I was running on the street, working out in my basement, stuff like that. But I just tried it. We came back from COVID, and with my times, my name was among the top athletes in Germany. And everybody was like ‘Who is she? Where does she come from?’ That was great because I felt like an underdog. I had no pressure.”

She won individual medals in the German Under-20 and Under-23 Championships, in addition to three relay golds in senior national championships.

Just as how far she could go was coming into focus, she arrived at another crossroads. The coach who helped jumpstart her rise retired. Nearly finished with her undergraduate studies, she wasn’t ready to give up running. But with her coach gone and feeling isolated at her club, she wondered if a job in the real world was a more logical next step than track.

One more avenue remained. No stranger to wanderlust, studying abroad intrigued her even before she thought track and field might be her ticket around the globe. And her performances on big stages—including a fourth-place finish in the 4×100-meter relay in the 2023 European Athletics U23 Championships—caught enough eyes across the Atlantic Ocean that she visited several schools in the fall of that year, including Vanderbilt.

“If I get that opportunity going to the U.S., my journey on track continues,” Benzinger recalled thinking. “If not, it’s not meant to be.”

At Vanderbilt, Benzinger found powerful mentors in sprints coach Cameia Alexander, pictured, and Althea Thomas.

Fitting In and Standing Out

Since arriving at Vanderbilt in 2021, Thomas has proved adept at recruiting and mentoring high school standouts and more experienced transfers alike. It’s a balancing act coaches must master in the age of the transfer portal. In the past two years alone, Veronica Fraley won  SEC shot put and discus titles, NCAA discus title and went on to compete for the United States in the Olympics, and heptathlete Beatrice Juskveciute won the SEC title and a silver medal in the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships. Both were graduate transfers. In Benzinger, Thomas saw a similar profile of a student-athlete with elite international experience who knew what she wanted on and off the track.

“Athletically, she had produced some outstanding times,” Thomas said. “She came from a system where she knew what serious training was. She understood the commitment. She had foundational skills that fit very well into transitioning to compete in the SEC. And she had an immaculate academic résumé. So, we really went after her. We were competing with a couple of different schools, and she definitely wanted a good academic fit.”

Nashville was an easy adjustment, its big-city culture and regional bonhomie reminiscent of Munich. Life on West End was more foreign. At home, academics and athletics were separate worlds, her university and running club unrelated. But in both cases, she had quite a bit of autonomy in shaping how and when she fulfilled her obligations. At Vanderbilt, the academic pace was rewarding but unrelenting. And on the track, where Thomas is responsible for nearly 50 students-athletes, coaching isn’t concierge service.

“I came from a system with a lot of freedom, a lot of decision making on my own,” Benzinger said. “And here there were a lot of routines, a lot of unity, maybe authority—which isn’t bad. But there’s a lot of discipline, and sometimes I felt like ‘Oh my God, I’m not a freshman. I have my own life and my routines.’ But I just had to get used to it. And honestly, I’m so thankful that it is like that because this experience has taught me so much more about myself and helped me so much to develop in track, too.”

Hot chicken and country music may represent one sort of culture shock for someone coming to Nashville from abroad. The hyper-collaborative team environment of American collegiate track and field is another. Thomas uses the analogy of the IMG Academy in this country, where athletes train alongside peers but a team dynamic is secondary.

“I’m accustomed to working with international athletes and don’t really get upset when we come to those crucible moments of learning because I’ve seen it before,” Thomas said. “It’s about maintaining the team culture needed to be unified and work together, but also trying to give space for her to grow with the new expectations. It’s allowing her the space to talk it out and express herself.

“You came here to train with individuals who can push you. You said you’ve been in the same system for a while and need a new stimulus. What the new stimulus means is that we’ve got to work together.”

In the airport during an early road trip, Benzinger marveled at the sight of her teammates all clad in similar team-branded gear. She felt like she was traveling with the German national team, which was just about the only time she had experienced such literal uniformity.

The team dynamic is a feature, not a bug. Track and field is a team sport at the college level, complete with NCAA championships. But it’s not just about the hardware at the end of the season or “rah-rah” school spirit. Being part of a collaborative training environment accelerates growth, whether that’s a fellow sprinter challenging Benzinger to find extra speed, a distance runner trading nutrition tips or a multi-event athlete supporting her after a race. You may compete alone, but you grow together.

 “At home, you run for your club, but there are multiple coaches with multiple athletes in different groups—so you’re not unified,” Benzinger said. “Here, you have to open yourself up and accept you have people who support you and really want to help you. They want you to do good. I had to take my time at first to get comfortable in the team and the structure. But now, I feel like they really want the best for me.

“They don’t just pretend they want the best—they really want me to succeed because we’re running for the same school and we have the same goals.”

Finishing the Race

As the outdoor season gets underway, Benzinger has goals left to achieve. Eclipsing Haley Bishop’s school records in the 100 and 200 meters would be a good start. Qualifying for the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships at famed Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, is also high on the list. And she would like to run for her country again, taking on Europe and the world’s best.

“It’s just continuing to give her those challenges and stimuli in practice and meets as we develop up,” Thomas said. “With that, she can make the uncomfortable comfortable and allow what she’s put into herself in training, and what she’s capable of doing, to come out in those high intensity moments in competition.”

It’s in those moments that she knows it’s all worth it. For a young woman from Bavaria racing in the heart of the SEC, it’s all about the thrill of seeing just how far she can go.