Emmi Scales: The Hurdler from the Chicago Suburbs Who Wouldn’t Be Stopped
Emmi Scales was eight years old the first time she lined up against a group of older athletes and left them all standing. She had tagged along to her brother P.J.’s football practice, and when the team ran sprints, she ran with them. She won. The boys were furious. Her father, Patrick, recognized something worth nurturing and went looking for a track program.
That moment on a football practice field in suburban Chicago set in motion one of the more compelling development stories in Illinois prep athletics — and now, at the University of Kentucky as a junior, it is becoming something more significant than that. Emmi Scales is one of the best collegiate hurdlers in the country, a two-time USTFCCCA Academic All-American, and a young woman who has built her career on a foundation of relentless work, family support, and a willingness to face down the things that scare her.
Growing Up in the Chicago Suburbs
Emmi Scales was born in 2004 and grew up in the Chicago metropolitan area, moving through several communities in the northwest suburbs of the city. She attended St. Walter’s School in Roselle for her primary education before her family relocated to Bartlett, then Inverness, and eventually Des Plaines, where she completed her high school years. That pattern of movement is worth noting because it meant Emmi was regularly adapting to new environments, new training partners, and new communities — a kind of early education in self-reliance and flexibility that would serve her well.
Athletics ran in the family. Her mother, Anna, was a successful high school track athlete. Her father Patrick played basketball and ran some track of his own. Her brother P.J. — the same one whose football team she outsprinted when she was eight — went on to play catcher at Johns Hopkins University. By Emmi’s own description, they are a sporty family, and her mother in particular gave her a blueprint for what focused, disciplined athletic effort looks like. P.J. taught her something different: the value of going all out, every time, for everything.
Before she was a hurdler — before she was a sprinter in any organized sense — she was a competitive cheerleader. For nine years, including two years at Saint Viator High School in Arlington Heights, she competed in cheerleading while also running track. That parallel path is relevant to who she became as an athlete: cheerleading at a competitive level demands body awareness, explosive power, precision timing, and a tolerance for physical risk that maps remarkably well onto hurdle technique.
Finding Her Event: The Road to Hurdles
Emmi’s track career did not begin at the hurdles. She was a sprinter first, naturally gifted in the short dashes, developing her raw speed with a club near her family’s Bartlett home starting around age nine. When the family moved to Inverness, she transitioned to the Flippen Flyers, a club based in Palatine, where she found something she hadn’t had before: a genuine community.
“That was where I really found a love for the sport,” she has said. “They were like family to me. My coach, Joshua Bostick, was motivational and inspiring.”
When COVID-19 hit in 2020 and the Flippen Flyers program closed, Emmi was devastated. She considered quitting. It was Coach Bostick himself who talked her out of it and encouraged her to find a new home and keep going.
She landed at TNT Track Academy in Mount Prospect, where she has trained since her freshman year at Saint Viator in 2019. There she worked with Coach Brandon Stryganek and Kirsten Nozime — the latter also the boys’ track and field coach at Saint Viator — and the partnership proved to be the one that unlocked her ceiling as a hurdler.
It was Coach Nozime who persuaded her to try the hurdles again after her sophomore year. She hadn’t been comfortable with them.
“I was so afraid of hurdles,” she has recalled. “I had been away from them for a while, and I wasn’t ready to throw my body back into them.”
What she learned, once she committed to the event, was the technical discipline that defines elite hurdling. “It’s so technical, especially in between the hurdles,” she explained. “You don’t want any unnecessary movement in your arms, and you want to be the fastest up and over the hurdles. You’re not jumping over the hurdles, you’re running over them.” That framing — the hurdles as obstacles to be threaded through speed rather than cleared through height — is a mark of sophisticated technical thinking, particularly in a teenager.
High School: A Breakout at Saint Viator
Emmi competed at Saint Viator High School in Arlington Heights, an independent Catholic school in the ESCC conference, and over four years there she earned four letters in track and field. Her early years included a stretch of injuries — shin splints, back pain, knee problems — that slowed her development and, as she has noted, made her junior year state experience a painful one. She did not compete in the hurdles at the IHSA state meet during her sophomore outdoor season due to injury, finishing eighth in the 200 and 13th in the 100.
That experience fueled something. Her coaches noticed. “She is a hedge specialist,” Saint Viator assistant Mike Olayos later said. “You knew then that she was coming back stronger and hungrier.”
Her junior year, 2021-22, was the one that confirmed what those coaches had seen. Indoors, she was the Illinois indoor champion in the 60 meters and runner-up in the 60 hurdles. She was named an All-American at Adidas Track Nationals, placing fourth in the 60 hurdles and second in the 60 meters. She was named ESCC Conference co-athlete of the year, broke the ESCC conference 100-hurdle record, and tied the 300-hurdle record.
Then came the outdoor season and the IHSA state championships. With a weather delay of two hours and a wet track, Scales made program history by winning the state title in all three events she entered: the 100-meter dash (12.32 seconds), the 100-meter hurdles (14.01), and the 300-meter hurdles (42.81). She was pushed through the first 60 meters of the 100 hurdles by Brianna Dixon of Rantoul, but she prevailed. The triple was an extraordinary performance. “I raced without any competition all season,” she said afterward. “No one was pushing me.”
That summer, at the USATF Junior Olympic Championships in Sacramento, Emmi added a national title to her collection. She won the women’s 17-18 division 100-meter hurdles in a wind-legal 13.52 seconds, and added All-American honors in the 400-meter hurdles and the 4×400 relay.
Her senior year, 2022-23, continued the upward arc. She was named Illinois Cross Country/Track and Field Coaches Association Athlete of the Year. She set a new Illinois state indoor record in the 60-meter hurdles at the D1 17 Grand Prix in Lake Villa, won the 60-meter hurdles at that meet, and entered the Indoor New Balance Nationals in Boston ranked fifth in the country in the event. She added two more indoor state titles and five more outdoor state titles across her career, ending her prep years with a collection of seven state championships — a remarkable record at any level.
By the time she walked off the Saint Viator track for the last time as a prep athlete, she had been named to the four-year honor roll, earned all the recognition her school and state had to offer, and committed, in October 2022, to the University of Kentucky — a program she chose for its track record of developing Olympic-caliber hurdlers and its rich history of producing elite women’s track athletes.
Arriving in Lexington: Freshman Year at Kentucky
Emmi Scales enrolled at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 2023 as a journalism major, joining one of the most storied women’s track and field programs in the SEC. The shadow of the program’s history loomed large — Masai Russell, the Olympic gold medalist who had set the program record in the 60-meter hurdles at 7.75, had trained there. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone had run at Kentucky. Abby Steiner had run at Kentucky. The tradition was real, and so was the competition for spots and recognition within it.
Her freshman indoor season showed promise without yet reaching the ceiling she would eventually push against. She won the 60-meter hurdles at the Indiana Early Bird meet with a time of 8.29 and won the 200 meters there as well at 24.94. At the Rod McCravy Memorial meet, she set a personal best of 7.53 in the 60-meter dash and a new mark of 8.18 in the 60-meter hurdles, placing fourth in that event. That 8.18 tied for eighth all-time in Kentucky program history — a notable entry for a freshman.
Her freshman outdoor season was quieter. She made her outdoor debut at the UCF Black and Gold Challenge, placing third in the 400-meter hurdles with a time of 59.64. She placed second in the 400-meter hurdles with a time of 1:01.12 at the EKU Spring Meet. The outdoor campaign served largely as a foundation-building year, and that investment would pay dividends.
On the academic side, Emmi earned placement on the SEC First-Year Academic Honor Roll and the USTFCCCA All-Academic Athlete honor in 2024, demonstrating from her first year that the journalist in her was keeping pace with the hurdler.
Sophomore Breakthrough: The 2024-25 Season
Her sophomore indoor season was marked by steady competitive work, including a sixth-place finish in the 60-meter hurdles at the SEC Championships with a time of 8.37. She continued to develop her 300-meter race, posting a personal best of 39.54 at the McCravy Memorial.
But it was the outdoor season of 2025 that signaled she was becoming a genuinely elite performer. She opened her outdoor campaign at the Jim Click Shootout with a win in the 100-meter hurdles. She followed with a seventh-place finish in the 100-meter hurdles at the Texas Relays with a 13.29 and a second-place finish in the 100 hurdles at the Drake Relays (where she also won the shuttle hurdle relay and placed third in the sprint medley relay). At the SEC Championships, she placed fourth in the 100-meter hurdles in 13.00 — a competitive performance against the deepest conference field in the country.
The signature moment of her sophomore outdoor season came at the NCAA East Regionals, where she ran personal bests in both the 100-meter hurdles (12.93, tied for fifth all-time in Kentucky history) and the 400-meter hurdles (57.63, seventh all-time in Kentucky history). Those times sent her to the NCAA Outdoor Championships, where she finished 11th in the semifinal of the 100-meter hurdles — just one place outside the cut line for the final, a painful but instructive near-miss.
That outdoor season earned her 2025 NCAA Second Team All-American recognition and USTFCCCA Academic All-American status. She had crossed the threshold from prospect to legitimate national contender.
The Historic Junior Indoor Season: 2025-26
No indoor season in Emmi Scales’s career to date has looked like the one she ran in 2025-26, and it is hard to argue with the numbers.
She entered the season as a known commodity in the SEC and a potential national title contender, and from the first meet she looked like someone running with a purpose. She improved her personal best time at five consecutive competitions across the indoor season — a progression that speaks to extraordinary form development and coaching. Her times through that stretch: 8.34 at the Louisville Opener (second), 8.27 at the Corky Classic (fourth), and then the sequence that put the country on notice.
At the Rod McCravy Memorial in Lexington, she won the event and broke the 8-second barrier for the first time, running 7.99 in the semifinals to lead all three heats. At the Crossroads of America Invitational in Indianapolis, she won again. At the Commodore Winter Challenge at Vanderbilt, she added a third win. Each performance moved her higher in the national rankings.
On February 13, 2026, at the Tiger Paw Invitational in Clemson, she ran 7.86 in the semifinals and then 7.83 in the final — a new personal best and the second-fastest time in Kentucky history behind only Masai Russell’s 7.75 program record. That performance made her the NCAA’s number-one ranked hurdler in the 60-meter event for the 2026 season, and ranked her third in the world for the indoor campaign. It was the fourth time in five meets that season she had improved her career best time.
Kentucky’s athletics department made the stakes plain in the context they offered: the only Wildcat faster than Emmi Scales over 60 meters indoors is an Olympic gold medalist. That is extraordinary company to be approaching.
The SEC Indoor Championships in College Station, Texas on February 28, 2026 brought more history. Emmi won the women’s 60-meter hurdles final with a time of 7.85 — the first SEC indoor hurdles title of her career — and was named the 2026 SEC Women’s Indoor Scholar Athlete of the Year and the 2026 SEC Women’s Co-Runner of the Year (sharing that honor with Ole Miss’s Alicia Burnett). She carried a 3.871 GPA into the conference championships week, making the dual recognition — athlete and scholar — entirely appropriate.
At the 2026 NCAA Indoor Championships in Fayetteville, Arkansas on March 13-14, she advanced through the semifinals and reached the national final, finishing fifth with a time of 7.95. For a junior competing in a field of the very best collegiate hurdlers in the country, fifth place in the NCAA final is a result to build on rather than apologize for. She was already thinking forward.
2026 Outdoor Season: More Records Fall
The early 2026 outdoor season has continued the upward trajectory. At the Texas Relays in Austin on April 4-5, 2026, Scales led a Kentucky sweep of the women’s 100-meter hurdles top positions, winning the event in 12.82 seconds. Her World Athletics profile shows an outdoor 100-meter hurdles personal best of 12.75, set on April 3, 2026 at the UCF Soccer and Track Complex in Orlando — a new career record that reset the benchmark she had set at the 2025 NCAA East Regionals. That 12.75 is a significant time, placing her solidly in the conversation among the fastest collegiate hurdlers in the country entering the meat of the 2026 outdoor season.
As of mid-April 2026, Emmi Scales ranks #69 in the World Athletics global rankings for the women’s 100-meter hurdles — a striking position for a college junior who is still technically mid-career.
Athletic Profile
Scales is listed as a sprints specialist for Kentucky, but her event profile is genuinely multi-dimensional. She competes in the 60-meter hurdles and 100-meter hurdles as her primary events, also runs the 400-meter hurdles, contributes to relay teams in the 4×100 and 4×400, and has shown the flat speed that makes all of it work — her personal best of 7.53 in the 60-meter flat and 23.88 in the indoor 200 meters reflect a raw sprint capacity that underlies her hurdle performances.
In the Kentucky record books, she sits in second place all-time in the indoor 60-meter hurdles (7.83), tied for fifth in the outdoor 100-meter hurdles (the previous mark of 12.93, now surpassed), and seventh in the outdoor 400-meter hurdles (57.63). The program she is measuring herself against has produced some of the best hurdlers in American athletic history. She is running fast enough to make that comparison relevant, which is saying something.
Her coaches at TNT Track Academy — Brandon Stryganek and Kirsten Nozime — were with her through her entire Saint Viator career. The continuity of that coaching relationship during her formative years is reflected in the technical excellence she has brought to Kentucky.
Academics and Character
Emmi is majoring in journalism — originally listed as such and also referenced in some reports as criminal justice during the 2025-26 season — and she has been consistent in her academic recognition across every year at Kentucky. She has earned the SEC Spring Academic Honor Roll, the SEC First-Year Academic Honor Roll, USTFCCCA All-Academic Athlete recognition in 2024, and two USTFCCCA Academic All-American honors in 2025 and 2026. The SEC named her their Women’s Indoor Scholar Athlete of the Year for 2026, recognizing that the excellence on the track and in the classroom are part of the same story.
She has also spoken openly about the mental side of competition. “It’s too much pressure to want to win,” she told her high school before heading to New Balance Nationals in 2023. “I just want to be happy and hope to get a personal best.” That philosophy — process over outcome, joy in the execution over anxiety about the result — has served her well in a sport where the technical demands of hurdling make psychological composure as important as physical preparation.
Social Media
Emmi Scales is active on Instagram at @emmi.scales, where she has amassed approximately 4,873 followers as of early 2026. She also maintains an account on X (formerly Twitter) at @emmiscales_, where her earlier posts documented her USATF national championship win and her commitment to Kentucky. Both accounts reflect an athlete who engages with her platform without letting it become a distraction from the work itself.
Sponsorships
Emmi Scales competes for the University of Kentucky, which holds a gear partnership with Nike — meaning she trains and competes in Nike product as part of the program’s existing arrangements. No individual, named commercial sponsorships for Emmi Scales were publicly documented at the time of this writing. That is entirely standard for a collegiate junior athlete still developing her profile, and it is worth noting that the NIL era means collegiate athletes of her caliber increasingly have the opportunity to pursue personal partnerships. As her profile continues to grow — and the trajectory of the 2025-26 season makes growth the reasonable expectation — formal sponsorship arrangements would be a natural next step.
The Road Ahead
Emmi Scales has one more year of collegiate eligibility after the 2026 outdoor season concludes, and if her junior season is any indication, her senior year at Kentucky is likely to be one of the more watched in the program’s recent history. She came into the SEC’s most competitive hurdles conference and ran 7.83 in her first full season as a national contender. She ran 12.75 in the outdoor 100 hurdles within the first weeks of the 2026 outdoor season. She is still improving in ways that suggest she has not yet found the ceiling.
Beyond Kentucky, the horizon includes the possibility of representing the United States in international competition. She is already ranked in the top 70 in the world in the 100-meter hurdles. She is 21 years old. The number will only get smaller if the work continues the way it has been going.
Her father saw something when she outran that football team at age eight. Her coaches at the Flippen Flyers saw it. Coach Nozime saw it when she convinced a young woman who was afraid of hurdles to try them one more time. What they all saw is becoming increasingly clear to anyone watching collegiate track and field: Emmi Scales is the real thing, and the best chapter of her story hasn’t been written yet.
Personal bests (as of April 2026): 60mH — 7.83 (i) (Clemson, Feb. 13, 2026); 100mH — 12.75 (Orlando, April 3, 2026); 400mH — 57.63 (2025); 60m (flat) — 7.53 (i); 200m — 23.88 (i). Current world ranking: #69 in 100m hurdles. Competes for University of Kentucky Wildcats (SEC). Hometown: Des Plaines, Illinois. High school: Saint Viator HS, Arlington Heights, IL, Class of 2023.
