Ra’Shawn Jones overcame a lifetime of obstacles to earn All-America honors at the 2018 NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships in May.
Ra’Shawn Jones ’20 gets down in the starting blocks. He stares down at the track.
As he lifts his gaze, the look in his eyes is intimidating.
Not just intensity—it’s fire. Maybe even a little bit of rage.
“I look right at the middle of the first hurdle, and I see all of them,” Jones says. “I imagine running through it—just getting through it—and finishing it out.”
It wasn’t that long ago that clearing a hurdle was impossible for him. His hips were almost a foot lower than the gateboard. But he kept growing. So he kept trying.
“It was something I wanted to be good at,” he said. “I had the ability.”
Jones doesn’t give up when it gets hard. He never has.
Not when he grew up rarely seeing his father.
Not when his family didn’t know where their next meal was going to come from.
Not when his family didn’t know where they were going to live.
And no matter how fast this runner gets, he will never leave the people he loves behind.
"From a young age, my mom would tell me, ‘You’re the man of the house,’” Jones recalls. “At first, I’d be playin’ and say, ‘I know I’m the man of the house.’ But then I realized I really had to grow up.”
It was his sophomore year at Lawrence Central High School. His family had just been evicted from their apartment, leaving his mother, his older sister, and him with no place to go.
There were nights spent in a motel room. There were nights spent in their car.
At school, Jones quickly ducked out of conversations that included the question, “Do you want to come over to my house?” He was afraid of where that would lead.
“When I filled out my SAT my junior year, I had to put the last address that I lived at. But I wasn’t living anywhere.”
The day he turned 16, he got a job at Waffle House.
“When your mom is asking for money from your job to pay rent, it’s like, ‘Alright. I got you.’”
And through it all, Ra’Shawn was still mad if he brought home a C on his report card.
“One of the reasons I tried to keep my grades up was because you can be a good athlete, but if you don’t have the grades, you won’t get in to good colleges.”
He received offers from Division I schools. None of them was a full-ride, though, so none of them was an offer he could accept.
That’s when Clyde Morgan called.
“The first time Coa ch Morgan called me, we were on the phone for two and a half hours,” Jones says. “I was like, ‘Dang. This dude is actually caring about me.’”
“In my 18 years of recruiting for track, I’ve done that with about 10 kids,” Morgan says. “With Ra’Shawn, I remember that we didn’t discuss track until the last 20 minutes.
“Some people run away from kids like Ra’Shawn. I run toward them. I just thought he needed me, and he needed Wabash. So I rolled the dice.
Morgan had a similar upbringing.
“I was a young kid from inner-city Youngstown, Ohio, and when people found out I had a son on the way, they backed away. They didn’t give me a chance. And then here comes my old coach, Bill Ross. He didn’t run away. He ran toward me. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it through college.”
Morgan asked Jones to make one visit to Wabash. That was it.
But that was all it took.
“I star ted thinking about my future,” Jones says. “With hurdles, I thought I was going to get to college and plateau. I didn’t know I was going to keep getting better—I definitely wanted to. So I told myself, ‘I’m going to try this Wabash thing. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll still have a way to get a good job.’”
His first year came with a lot of ups and downs. It came with tears.
But Morgan was there every time.
“He’s probably the only person I could look up to like a father,” Jones says. “It would be nice to come close to being someone like him.
“He does a lot of things with his family that I would like to do, and he lets people know he cares for them. He’s understanding, but he’ll get on you whenever he needs to. He’s not going to let you slip through. He’s not going to let you be mediocre.”
Jones’s twitter handle is @silent_goof.
He says he changed it one time but those two words describe him perfectly.
In class, the religion major thinks a lot, but he doesn’t say much.
“He’s soft-spoken at first but then gregarious once you get to know him a little bit,” Associate Professor of Religion Derek Nelson ’99 says. “He’s driven and he’s grown a lot in two years— perhaps more than any other student I can think of.
“And he listens better than most students. You get the sense that most students are waiting until it’s their turn to talk again. But if I put him on the spot, I can tell that he’s been listening really carefully.”
Then there’s the side of Jones that lets loose at track practice.
“I’ve had to stop myself and go, ‘That’s OK,’” Morgan says. “He’s had to grow up a lot quicker than a lot of our other guys. He’s allowed to be a little goofy right now.
“But then there are times when I’ll look at him and go, ‘Now that’s a man.’”
One of those t imes came the night of the track and field awards banquet.
Jones received the titles of Most Improved Performer and Most Valuable Performer, but he wasn’t there to accept them.
“He went home and watched his niece for his sister,” Morgan says. “After a long weekend at our conference meet, after a long bus ride, he got back at two in the morning and then jumped up Sunday morning to drive to Indianapolis. That’s Ra’Shawn.”
His niece, La’Riyah, is 20 months old. Her bir thday is December 25. He has dozens of pictures of her on his phone.
“I remember going to the hospital on Christmas Eve and my sister saying, ‘I’m about to have this baby,’” Jones says. “She went through the night, had the baby the next morning, and all I could think was, This is the best Christmas gift she could ever have.”
“i have no idea what I want to do once I graduate,” Jones says. “I just want to make it to where my family doesn’t worry about where a meal is coming from anymore. I don’t want to worry about rent. I just want to take that out of the equation and see how we could live then. Just have a comfortable life.”
“He knows that when he gets that diploma, that will change his family’s life, and I relate to that,” Morgan says. “That was me. When you grow up rough, that degree is like earning a lottery ticket. That’s what he’s about—he wants to help his family.”
Jones’s mom used to tell him to treat life like a race. “Just get over the hurdles and you’ll be fine,” she’d say.
This year he got finer with practically every race, saving his best for last and finishing fifth in the finals of the 110-meter hurdles at the 2018 NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships.
And the rising junior isn’t stopping any time soon.
“The sky’s the limit for Ra’Shawn,” Nelson says. “I think he’s really hitting his stride, so to speak.”
But Jones also slows down when he needs to. He’s making sure he enjoys every moment here because it’s the most stability he’s had in a long time.
“I think of Wabash as home. It’s a place where I can be myself. And I’m accepted for it.”