Xavier Nation Magazine Feature: Conquering Hurdles

Call it fitting, or coincidental—or both—that Will Roberts has found the 400-meter hurdles to be the best outlet for his promising athletic talent. Before even thinking of a college track career, the Xavier University freshman had already cleared real-life hurdles, ones that could have kept him from ever reaching the safe spot he found four years ago in high school in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Roberts was born in a refugee camp in Ghana, in West Africa, in 1999. His family roots are in nearby Liberia, but Liberia was ravaged by civil war for nearly 15 years, from 1989 to 2003. As Reuters has reported it, "Liberia became for many a byword for savagery, and hundreds of thousands died."

Roberts's family managed to avoid the very worst of it.

"But my mother's and our family's houses got burned down," he says. "They decided to migrate to Ghana, and they were allowed to stay in the camp."

Roberts's mother, Fanete, was pregnant with him when they arrived. Until around age 5, the camp was the only life he knew.

"We had a little house," Roberts says, "but it didn't have a TV and it barely had a kitchen. And it didn't have showers. I would shower outside, butt naked, with a pail."

In hindsight, Roberts is glad he wasn't born sooner. He didn't have to endure being an older child in the camp and better realizing its conditions.

"I looked it up once, when I was older, and it just looked horrible," he says. "I just couldn't imagine having been born there and living there."

will roberts

Roberts still isn't clear on the mechanics of how he and his mother got to the United States.

"My father got here first, with my brother," he says. "Family helped him out. They were sprinkled around the U.S., coming here little by little. And my father did some kind of a process and was able to send for us."

But early life in America, in Staten Island, New York, was no star-spangled affair.

"We lived in the projects," Roberts says, "and the middle school I went to was ranked No. 1 among the most dangerous schools in New York. People would literally die right outside the school. And I always got in trouble. I remember once being in handcuffs for something stupid. And then my mother sent me to Greensboro to live with my aunt. It was an adjustment, but in the end it was so much better."

Roberts attended T. Wingate Andrews High, a well-regarded magnet school, and thus began the process of his making it to Xavier, where he's regarded as one of the top young track prospects in the BIG EAST.

"The coaches at my high school saw me playing basketball and suggested I run track," he says. "And every meet I seemed to be doing better, and by the time I was a senior, my coach told me, 'Your times are good enough to run in college.'"

With his coach's help, Roberts marketed himself to college track programs. He made a number of campus visits, including Ohio State, North Carolina, and North Carolina State, but he quickly settled on Xavier after visiting the campus and meeting coach Ryan Orner.

"I loved it here from the first minute," he says. "It was a smaller school, but with a bigger name, you might say. It just felt like a place I could all home."

Roberts joined the track team as a "preferred walk-on," guaranteed a place on the squad.

"He first came with a group of five or six others," Orner says, "and he immediately stood out for his poise and how he carried himself. It was clear he was a kid who had seen a lot, done a lot, and been through a lot. And his talent is excellent. We expect him to be at least one of the top two or three hurdlers in the BIG EAST before he's done."
will roberts

And on March 31, at the Oliver Nikoloff Open, hosted by the University of Cincinnati, Roberts won the 400 hurdles with a Xavier-record time of 55.06 seconds. He smashed the old record, beating by more than one-and-one-half seconds the record of 56.65 that had stood since 2009.

Roberts puts no ceiling on his track potential. He smiles with a confident gleam in his eyes when asked if he thinks he can leave Xavier as a school record-holder, and he says he dreams of the Olympics. But he is also serious about pursuing a mechanical engineering degree, and he is an accomplished young poet. He has traveled to poetry festivals and has won a poetry slam with his signature work, a long and introspective piece titled "I Am African."

"It took me years to write it," he says. "It took me years to accept who I was. Once I got here [to the U.S.], I was being called an 'African booty-scratcher.' I grew up not wanting to be African and not wanting anyone to know it. But when I finally finished it, it was one of the best things for me. It made me more confident in myself. It's about knowing who you are and accepting who you are."

Should the occasion ever arise, Xavier Nation, ask Roberts to recite it for you. It's as moving as his fleet trips over the hurdles.

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