Nathan Beitler/MDN Haleigh Carr competes at the North Dakota Class A state track meet at the Bismarck Community Bowl earlier this year. Carr won the triple jump state title as a junior and will be continuing her athletic career at North Dakota State in the fall.

On display in a plaque in Haleigh Carr’s room is the medal she won her junior year, forever crowning her a high school track and field state champion.

The 2024 triple jump champion from Minot High still remembers that day vividly, but said it took her several weeks to fully come to the reality of what she had accomplished. Especially when she considers that a career in track and field almost never happened had it not been for the combination of some less-than-subtle jabbing by a middle school friend and her high school wrestling coach.

“For the longest of times, my middle school best friend kept asking me to do track and I was like ‘No. Why would I run for fun?'” Carr said. “But then in 8th grade I was like ‘Sure, why not?’ I was never really interested in it until my friend continuously begged me to do it with her.”

Carr began her track and field career in eighth grade, but stuck specifically to the track events. She competed in the 100-meters, 200m, 100m hurdles, the 4x100m relay and the 4x200m relay at Jim Hill Middle School. She competed in the same events when she arrived at Minot High as a freshman, spending most of the year competing at the junior varsity level, running a few events at the varsity level in the 100m and 200m.

It wasn’t until the following year that Carr broadened her horizons to the field events, electing to participate in both the triple jump and the long jump at the request of her wrestling coach during a practice one day in the winter.

“I started jumping my sophomore year because I do girls wrestling in the winter and we were doing power skips and my coach asked me if I jumped in track and when I said no, he said that I should try,” Carr said. “So I thought about it and I decided to try it and I just kind of fell in love with it from there.”

While she was willing to do the triple jump and the long jump, the high jump was an event she could not be peer pressured into. Carr said she took one look at the bar on the high jump and immediately said no.

As a sophomore, Carr participated in four varsity meets in the long jump and five varsity meets in the triple jump, including her first appearance at the state meet in Bismarck, where she placed 16th in the triple jump with a distance of 33-feet, 7.25-inches. Carr would return to the state meet the following year, and leave a champion.

Her experience at the state meet her junior year didn’t start the way she would have liked. The first day, Carr had failed to record a successful attempt in the long jump, committing a foul on all of her jumps. While it stung, in a way it gave her a sense of perspective that helped ease her mind.

“The day before, we did long jump and I scratched all of my jumps, so going into triple that next day I just wanted a mark,” Carr said. “I wouldn’t say I didn’t care about it, but I was just going in with a very open mind. I just wanted a mark.”

Carr was in the second-to-last flight in the qualifying round. She was in 10th place after her first jump of 34-5.75 and jumped up seven spots to third after a second jump of 35-9.50. On her final attempt of the qualifying round, Carr hit a personal best at the time of 36-10.5 to set the best mark of the qualifying round and advance to the finals as the top seed. Her jump was eight inches farther than second place, which belonged to Fargo Davies’ Cayla Sailer.

In the finals, Carr’s first two attempts came in at 36-9.25 and 36-7, and no one had yet to best her previous mark from the qualifying round. That was until Grand Forks Red River’s Sophie Brakke set the new distance to beat at 36-11.25. But Carr’s title aspirations wouldn’t be denied, and in her final jump, Carr became a state champ with a new personal best of 37-3.75.

“It was such a surreal moment,” Carr said. “It took me a long time to finally sink in that I actually won. It was probably a couple weeks and it was just very surreal to hear all the cheering and see everyone in the crowd.”

Carr credits her coaching staff with helping her achieve her true potential. While head coach Disa Julius has been there for the entirety of Carr’s high school career, she has had a different jumping coach each year.

“They’ve all helped me in different ways and our head coach is a big support as well as our sprint coach and our hurdle coach,” Carr said. “I feel like they’re a very well organized and communicative coaching group and it reflects positively on their athletes.”

One would think winning a state title would be Carr’s most memorable moment from her track and field career, but it wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t even her most memorable moment from that season. That came on May 3, 2024, following the Howard Wood Dakota Relays in Sioux Falls, S.D., nearly 500 miles from home.

“We had the worst bus ever and the windows were broken and it was raining outside so it was raining in the bus,” Carr said. “And on the way home our tire blew and we were stranded and we didn’t get home until 3 a.m. It was a very weird experience at the time, but looking back at it, it was my favorite.”

Carr said the team had to wait for a bus from Bismarck to make the long trek down to South Dakota to pick them up. Carr was sitting toward the back of the bus when the bus started smelling like smoke and the floor began heating up. Eventually the driver pulled off to the side of the road and called in for help. It would take the bus from Bismarck about 90 minutes before it arrived to take them the rest of the way back to Minot.

This year’s state track meet marked the end of Carr’s high school track and field career, but she is far from finished with the sport she never thought she’d pick up in the first place. Carr committed to North Dakota State in May and will compete in both the triple jump and the long jump for coach Dennis Newell next season. Carr said she also had interest from a couple Division II schools in Minnesota, as well as from UND and Minot State, but ultimately went with the Bison.

“I liked the campus of NDSU and all the facilities they have and the coach was super nice as well as the athletes,” Carr said. “I just felt really at home when I was at NDSU.”

Carr plans to major in exercise science and hopes to fulfil her pre-med prerequisites so she can go to med school when she completes her undergrad. Her dream is to become an orthopedic surgeon. Her favorite classes at Minot High were the medical electives, specifically the medical careers class, where she had the opportunity to go to hospital clinics and view all the medical careers in person.

“I was going to major in biology because that’s the typical medical school major, but I knew I wouldn’t like it and I just love everything about sports medicine,” Carr said. “I think exercise science is more tailored toward the sports medicine aspect than biology would be.”

With a couple months remaining in between the end of her high school career and the start of her college career, Carr is doing what most kids her age are doing in the summer: hanging out with friends and relaxing in her room scrolling through TikTok videos, with that state championship medal in the background.