EXCLUSIVE: ‘THE GIRL WHO SHOVELED THE TRACK’

… and other stories about Menno senior Ashton Massey, who bounced back from emotional adversity to become one of South Dakota’s top track and field athletes and among the best Menno has ever seen — even success aside.

Prologue: Then and Now

It was Oct. 23, 2021 and Ashton Massey was competing in the State Cross-Country Meet at Yankton Trail Park in Sioux Falls.

A sophomore at the time, Massey had shown promise early on in her athletic career at Menno when she qualified for and finished 36th in the state cross-country field as a seventh grader. But she struggled the following two seasons, placing 41st as an eighth grader and 66th as a freshman, and when that sophomore season of 2021 concluded, she found herself toward the very back of the pack — 108th out of 115 runners.

Exhaustion and internal head games brought on by troubled self-esteem had taken their collective toll, and it was the low point of her prep athletic career.

“That season was a mess,” Ashton says today. “I just remember being really hard on myself and really sad a lot. I was exhausted both mentally and physically; I had no belief in my abilities, and I let what others said about me dictate how I felt about myself.”

But that was a long time ago.

At least that’s how it feels.

It’s now May 6, 2024 — just this past Monday morning — and Ashton, less than a week away from her high school graduation, is sitting at a desk inside a not-being-used-at-the-time computer classroom inside the only school of which she has ever attended, Menno Public.

Much had changed in the 2 ½ years since that cross-country low of 2021, and in addition to her decorated letter jacket, Ashton is wearing an easy and carefree smile, and for good reason. The three-time gold medalist at the 2023 State Track Meet and Augustana University-commit had most recently turned in perhaps her most impressive showing to date by winning the all-class 300-meter hurdles Saturday morning at the Dakota Relays at Howard Wood Field in Sioux Falls. Her time of 45.06 topped her previous best of 45.91 and broke her own school record — one of four she is part of. Ashton also has a school-best time in the 100 hurdles, distance in the triple jump and is on record as the anchor carry for the Wolves’ 4×800-meter relay that set school bests in 2023 and again at the Howard Wood Dakota Relays last Friday.

Noteworthy is that Ashton’s clocking in the 300 hurdles on Saturday was faster than the seven place-winners behind her, all of whom came from larger schools: Bennett County, Brandon Valley, Sioux Falls Christian, Spearfish, Harrisburg, and two from North Dakota: Bowman County and Legacy.

“I never, ever, in a million years, thought that I would be a Howard Wood champion,” she says.

So what happened between that low of her 2021 cross-country season and all that has come after?

“I found a good group of people to surround myself with — that was definitely a turning point for me,” Ashton says. “Who I was surrounding myself with was a huge factor in building confidence and where my head was at.”

So today, as she takes a media tour through the writings of statewide outlets like the Mitchell Republic, Yankton Press & Dakotan and 605sports.com, she is quick to credit those who have built her up while also keeping her eye on the prize. After all, she’s not done with high school athletics quite yet.

The 2024 South Dakota High School Activities Association State Track and Field Championships are just two weeks away, and she’s got titles to defend.

Read Jeremy Waltner’s Publisher’s Column, “Massey & Clark.”

Part 1: One step forward …

Ashton always knew she would be a student-athlete for the Wolves, and track and field was a given. Her mom and older brother, Tyler, were both hurdlers, and she also remembers Tyler as a very good triple jumper. It only made sense that she would follow suit starting in her earliest years of competition at Menno.

“I wanted to be a hurdler,” she says. “They really wanted me to run the mile and the 800 when I was younger, but I was like, ‘No, I want to hurdle.’”

Not only did Ashton have the desire, but she had the motivation through what she was seeing from her older teammates. In the spring of 2021 — her freshman season — Bridget Vaith and Jesse Munkvold were setting the pace in the hurdles. Not only that, but two other standouts in junior Raygen Diede and senior Morgan Edelman were helping give the Wolves a taste of team success as the Menno girls turned in a third-place finish at state, the best in program history.

Ashton still had a long way to go in her own development both physically and emotionally, but she did get a taste of success that freshman season, running the opening leg on the 4×400 relay team that finished seventh at state and was the third carry on the sprint medley relay team that finished fourth. It was a step forward to be certain, but steps backward were to come.

Her sophomore year of 2021-22 started busy for the multi-sport athlete with both volleyball and cross-country filling her extra-curricular time — and while things looked OK early on, Ashton was quietly struggling. While she bagged a couple of top-10 finishes on cross-country courses, she slipped to 14th in the region meet all the while not seeing much varsity playing time on the volleyball court.

“The combination of volleyball and cross-country was really taking a toll on me,” she says. “I wasn’t eating enough or generally taking care of myself. During that sophomore year there was a lot of stuff going on in my life that was really hard. I had no confidence in myself whatsoever.”

Then came that 108th-place finish at Yankton Trail Park. To call it rock bottom might be overly dramatic, but there may be no other way to describe it.

“I wasn’t in a good mindset at all,” Ashton says.

Part 2: Friends in low places

There’s no telling what might have happened had Ashton not founded a network of friends and coaches who pulled her out of her low following the cross-country season of 2021, but it’s safe to say that her support system was a turning point in her journey.

“Who I was surrounding myself with was a huge, huge factor in starting to gain confidence and where my head was at,” says Ashton, who started seeing glimmers of success and feeling nuggets of hope in the spring of 2022 — her sophomore track season. “Within my track team I found a lot of support from my friends and my coaches. They literally built me back up and that’s kind of where it all started to change.”

Among them was Bridget Vaith, who was just finishing her senior year at Menno.

“In our friendship dynamic, at that stage in life, she was definitely more of the realist and I was the optimist — like, ‘Look on the bright side,’” says Bridget, who just finished her sophomore year at Wayne State College where she is a Family and Consumer Science education major. “She was really struggling and would always point out the negative, and I’d be like, ‘But look at this, this and this — all these good things you’re doing.’ I’d give her that slap in the face and tell her that she didn’t need to pick at everything, and apparently that helped.”

“She was an amazing role model,” Ashton says of Bridget. “I can’t say enough good things about her. She showed me how to have a positive mindset and how to not feel sorry about it, and she’s picked me up in times when I needed it the most.”

Ashton also mentions Menno’s head girls track coach Ryan Liebl, “who believed in me from Day 1 and really helped build me up.”

Logan Ulmer, an assistant track coach at the time, was also an instrumental figure for Ashton her sophomore year “and played large role and was such a motivator and key person in my life,” she says.

And she says Munkvold, a senior her sophomore year, “built me as an athlete.”

Ashton says she still had a lot of work to do to get out of her own way, but she started finding some success in track and field at the onset of that sophomore season — and with foreshadowing results.

In early April of 2022 she won the triple jump and finished second in both the 100 and 300 hurdles at the Scotland Invitational, and later that month at Menno’s home Erv Ptak Relays, went 1-2-3 in the 300 hurdles, triple jump and 100 hurdles, respectively. And that May, Ashton earned her first state hardware, not once, not twice but three times, finishing fourth in the triple jump (33-02), fourth in the 100 hurdles (16.55) and fifth in the 300 hurdles (48.33) in all of Class B.

She was just getting started.

Part 3: Breakout season

Ashton would have been eager to get back on the track in the spring of her junior year anyway, but a difficult basketball season that made for a long, cold winter only compounded that desire.

Case in point: It was March 24, 2023 and the area was on the backend of one of the most extreme winters in recent memory. Fixing to stretch her legs, Ashton and friend and teammate Ellyana Ulmer — one grade-level younger than Ashton who also gets credit for helping her turn things around — visited the track in Menno to shovel snow off the lead curve.

“We were so ready to get on the track,” Ashton says. “I think it was a Saturday morning and we probably shoveled for two hours and got nowhere. Some Freeman people found out about that and they started calling me ‘The Girl who Shoveled the Track.’ There are worse things to be known for.”

“The next day Elyanna’s dad came with a skid loader, so it was all for nothing,” she laughs, “but it was the thought that counted.”

Needless to say, by the time the 2023 spring season rolled around, Ashton was more than ready to compete — and it showed. She won the first triple championship of her prep career in Centerville on April 11 with wins in the 100 hurdles, 300 hurdles and triple jump, won twice more at the Menno Relays two days later, anchored the 4×800 relay team that also included Kaelie Derby, Ulmer and Zoe Schaeffer to a school-record time of 10:19.43 at the Dakota Relays on May 5; and on May 11 at the Cornbelt Conference meet, won gold in her three open events.

Hard work was paying off.

“Great kid with a great work ethic,” says Liebl. “When she was younger, she was never confident about anything and nervous about everything. The more she got into it the more she believed and wanted it. With a kid like Ashton, once it catches on, they take off and the sky’s the limit.”

By the time the state meet rolled around last year, Ashton had posted top Class B performances in all three of her open events and went into the final meet of her junior year with a clear goal in mind: She wanted to be a state champion three times over.

“There was a lot of pressure,” she admits. “Being seeded No. 1 puts a lot on you and it was exhausting, but I had a lot of help from my coaches and my teammates. They got me through it.”

Ashton won the title in the 300 hurdles first (47.19) and then held off Freeman Public’s Rylee Peters in the 100 hurdles (15.38) to claim her second gold.

All that stood between Ashton and her goal was the triple jump, which didn’t come without its drama. She was just good enough to slip into the finals after scratching on her first two attempts, and then pulled off the win in her final jump of the day (34-10 ¾).

“To make a name for yourself and for your school, and to stand up on those championship podiums — you can’t beat it,” says Jo Auch, a former coach and athletic director at Menno who is wrapping up her career as an assistant executive director with the South Dakota High School Activities Association. “Ashton was just a young pup when I left Menno, but anytime you see success from the place you have roots, there’s a sense of pride in knowing what these small communities are about, and how they stand behind their people.”

Part 4: No day but today

With literally days before graduation, Ashton can look back on what has been another outstanding season. She erased memories of five state cross-country meets without a medal by earning 19th place at Yankton Trail Park last October — a return to the scene of that 106th place crime two years earlier. She was a key factor for the Wolves on the volleyball court and basketball court, even if those seasons didn’t necessary pan out the way she had hoped.

And — oh by the way — she decided that Augustana University would be her next stop on the track late last year and took part in a ceremonial signing in front of the entire Menno student body in November.

At that signing, Menno Superintendent Kory Foss said Ashton is an example for all.

“This shows what great things can happen when you put in all the hard work that Ashton has put in,” he told the students assembled inside the high school gym. “For those who maybe haven’t seen, she’s always here, always working. This is a result of that kind of dedication.”

“To have an athlete like this at a small school, it’s incredible,” said Liebl. “The girl works her butt off and deserves everything she’s got going.”

“This isn’t just a luck thing — this isn’t something that just happens,” says Vaith. “That’s something I admired about her even when I was in high school, in any sport, was the work and dedication she puts in. She loves it, she takes it seriously and she works so hard. She keeps breaking her own personal records, and that’s enough. Obviously, now, those personal records happen to be state gold medals, but even if that wasn’t in the picture, that’s still a win.”

And work remains.

While she won the 300 hurdles at last week’s Dakota Relays, Ashton showed her vulnerability with a subpar showing in the 100 hurdles — a ninth-place finish in the semifinals after what she says was a laughable start out of the blocks. And her best time in the 100 hurdles this season — 15.15 — is actually second in Class B to Burke’s Piper Hansen, who has clocked a 15.04.

It’s a good reminder that she needs to stay focused.

“There are days and races where (the pressure) affects me a lot more than others,” Ashton says, crediting assistant track coach Shaylee Schultz for helping her along the way in more recent years. “She really grounds me.”

Ashton is also working with a lifting coach at Augie who has helped her manage a level of anxiety that still exists to this day.

“She and Shaylee both have helped me turn more toward my faith and relying on that more heavily,” she says. “So this season I’ve really been focusing on giving it all to God and focusing on that.”

The Wolves have just a handful of competitions left before the state meet rolls around May 23-25, including the Cornbelt Conference meet in Menno on Thursday, and Ashton knows that target on her back has never been bigger. In addition to the second-best clocking in the 100 hurdles, she holds the top performance in Class B in the 300 hurdles at 45.06 and in the triple jump at 36-05 ¼.

“I’ve got to hit these last two weeks hard,” Ashton says. “I’m going to have to stay locked in and stay calm and collected; I cannot let my emotions get the best of me. I have to find some confidence (at state) in every single race. I can’t clock out in any event at any time.”

Liebl says his message to Ashton going into state is simple:

“Remember where you’re at and what you’ve worked for,” he said. “If you do what you’re capable of, nobody is going to beat you.”

Part 5: All those yesterdays

Of all the takeaways from the journey Ashton has been on — starting with the early belief that basketball was going to be her sport to the time she broke 16.0 in the 100 hurdles and realized that she could be something special — the need for emotional support from others is most profound.

“The critics and the people that have supported me, they’ve built me,” she said. “Both have fueled my determination and helped me grow my work ethic and my desire to achieve success.

“I would not be where I am without them; in every aspect of my life, so many people have done so many little things to help me improve,” she continues. “God has put so many people in my life at so many perfect times; that’s been amazing to witness firsthand.”

“Every athlete has struggled along the way, there’s no question,” says Auch. “But to start from the bottom and grow to where Ashton is today — not everybody has that privilege. She is obviously the kind of athlete and the kind of person who wants it so bad that she’s willing to do anything it takes, so hats off to her.”

And so the clock winds down on a prep career that will go down as one of the finest Menno has ever seen, regardless of what happens in Sioux Falls later this month. And years from now, when people remember Ashton Massey, they won’t likely remember what she accomplished on the track in terms of medals, but rather in terms of mental.

And that’s a legacy worth embracing — and a lesson for all.