Georgia’s Leaping Star: The Savannah Simmons Story
Born on January 15, 2006, in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, Savannah Simmons has spent her entire young athletic life compiling the kind of résumé that gets coaches at major universities paying attention. By the time she graduated from Mount Pisgah Christian School in Johns Creek and enrolled at Wake Forest University in the fall of 2024, she had already established herself as one of the most versatile and accomplished prep athletes in her classification in the state of Georgia — a multi-event standout with particular gifts in the long jump and the short sprints who carried an equally impressive academic record alongside her trophies and medals. She is now a sophomore jumper for the Demon Deacons, competing in one of the most demanding track and field conferences in the country, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and growing steadily as a college athlete. This is her story.
Alpharetta and the Early Years
Alpharetta sits in the northern reaches of Fulton County, one of the fastest-growing communities in metro Atlanta and a place whose sprawling neighborhoods, good public and private schools, and proximity to the city have made it a destination for upwardly mobile families settling in Georgia. It is also, in recent decades, a place that has produced a steady stream of competitive youth athletes — the kind of community where club sports, travel teams, and private training are accessible, and where athletic ambition is encouraged from an early age.
Savannah Simmons grew up there as the daughter of Kim and Reggie Simmons, and the older sibling of a brother named Winston. The specifics of how she first found her way onto a track are not extensively documented in the public record, but the arc of her high school career tells the story of an athlete who didn’t just show up to the sport — she was genuinely good at it right from the start. Her freshman year results are the results of someone who arrived at the high school level with a foundation already built, whether through middle school athletics, club programs, or simply natural athletic gifts that made their presence known early.
She attended Mount Pisgah Christian School in nearby Johns Creek, a private institution affiliated with the Georgia High School Association’s Class A Division 1 classification — the highest tier of the GHSA’s private school grouping. Mount Pisgah is an academically serious school, with AP courses across multiple disciplines and an admitted mission of preparing students for selective colleges. Its recent graduates have been accepted to institutions including Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgia Tech, and Wake Forest — the very school Simmons would eventually choose. The track program at Mount Pisgah competes against other private schools in the state’s smallest enrollment classification, but in Georgia’s Class A Division 1, that designation does not mean the competition is light. It means an athlete runs against the best small-school competition the state can offer, at a GHSA state meet held alongside schools from across all of Georgia’s private school sector.
Outside the classroom and the track, Simmons built the kind of extracurricular profile that speaks to genuine intellectual engagement and leadership. She served as Vice President of the student body, was a member of the National Honor Society, directed a DEI club called the Iron Club, sat on the Senior Leadership Council, and worked as a Student Ambassador. She received her school’s Math award. That combination — athletic excellence, student government leadership, honors academics, and community involvement — is not accidental. It reflects a young woman who approached high school with ambition across all of its dimensions, not merely the athletic ones.
Trinidad Toby Sports Academy: The Club Foundation
Parallel to her high school career, Savannah Simmons trained and competed through Trinidad Toby Sports Academy, a club track program that has developed numerous competitive sprinters and jumpers in the Georgia area. Club track in the American system operates alongside high school athletics, filling in the gaps between scholastic seasons, providing access to higher-level competition including AAU, USATF Junior Olympic circuits, and showcase invitationals that allow athletes to test themselves against peers from beyond their immediate geographic area. For a multi-event athlete with Simmons’s talent profile, club training through an established academy provided both the technical development and the competitive exposure that high school meets alone cannot deliver.
The club affiliation also opened the door to national-level showcase events. Her senior year long jump performance qualified her for the New Balance Nationals Outdoor meet, one of the most prestigious national high school track and field invitationals in the country, and she competed in the Indoor Adidas Nationals in the long jump through her club program, earning a top-eight finish — a legitimately elite result among the nation’s best prep jumpers.
High School Career at Mount Pisgah Christian: Four Seasons of Progress
Savannah Simmons’s four-year high school career at Mount Pisgah Christian was defined by consistent and progressive improvement across multiple events. Her primary event was the long jump, where she claimed a state championship title during her career, but she was by no means a one-event athlete. She also competed in the 100 metres, the 200 metres, and contributed to relay teams in ways that made her among the most multi-dimensionally valuable athletes her program had during her years there.
As a freshman, she announced herself at the state level immediately. She earned a second-place finish in the 4×100-metre relay at the GHSA Class A Division 1 State Championships, placed fifth in the 100 metres, and took second in the 200 metres. For a first-year high school athlete to reach the podium in multiple events at the state meet — against competitors who are often two, three, and four years older — is not commonplace. It marked her as a prospect to watch in subsequent seasons.
Her sophomore year saw the long jump begin to emerge as her signature event, as she secured a top-eight state finish in the event and continued to develop as a sprinter. The junior season deepened the case. At the 2023 GHSA Class A Division 1 State Championships, she placed third in the long jump with a leap of 17 feet, 6 inches — a mark that placed her comfortably in the state’s elite for the event — while also finishing in the top eight in the 100 metres and the top five in the 200 metres. She added a second-place finish in the 4×100 relay. Those collective results, in a classification where the best private school athletes in all of Georgia are in the same field, confirmed that she was not just a local standout. She was a genuine statewide contender across the sprint and jump disciplines simultaneously.
The senior season brought Simmons’s most complete performance. At the 2024 GHSA Track and Field State Championships — where the Class A Division 1 meet was held at Barron Stadium in Rome, Georgia — she was among the featured athletes for Mount Pisgah. She ran preliminary sprints in the 100 metres with a time of 12.37 seconds before the finals, placing herself among the fastest girls in the classification, and then raced to a third-place finish in the 200 metres (25.87) and fourth in the 100 at the state final. In the long jump, she reached 18 feet, 2 inches to claim the runner-up position — behind only the exceptional Denim Goddard of Oglethorpe County, whose 19-foot-2 clearance won the event. She also contributed to a third-place finish in the 4×400-metre relay, rounding out one of the most prolific individual state meet performances a Mount Pisgah athlete had produced in recent memory.
The Meet Preview coverage heading into that 2024 state meet specifically called Simmons out as a key battle in the sprints, describing anticipated matchups between her and Makayla Watts of Lamar County as one of the headlining duels for team points. That level of pre-meet attention — being named as one of the determining factors in team outcomes — is reserved for the very best athletes at a classification-level state meet, and it underscores the esteem in which she was held coming into her senior year.
Her Wake Forest bio formally credits her with being a high school long jump state champion — a distinction she earned at some point during her prep career, though the precise year is not fully documented in the public record across all four seasons. What the four-year arc does make clear is that she was one of the most consistent and productive multi-event contributors in the GHSA’s Class A Division 1 classification across her full tenure at Mount Pisgah.
She was also among the best in her classification in the 200 metres in the junior season results preserved from the 2021 state meet, where she ran 25.87 to claim a second-place finish — a time that speaks to genuine flat sprinting speed that translates directly to long jump runway velocity. The 200-metre personal best that appears in the official state records from that era is the kind of mark a Power Five college program notices when evaluating a jumper recruit.
World Athletics Profile: Early National-Level Marks
Savannah Simmons holds a World Athletics profile under athlete code 14721569 — the international registration system that serves as the official record of marks eligible for world rankings and world-level competition tracking. The personal bests recorded there from her high school career years include a wind-aided 100-metre time of 11.78 seconds (May 8, 2021, at a meet in Maryville, Missouri), a 60-metre indoor mark of 7.61 seconds (February 23, 2019, at a meet in Missouri — notably from her early competitive years, likely from a club indoor competition), a 4×100-metre relay leg of 45.89 seconds (May 26, 2022, at a meet in Allendale, Michigan), a 4×200-metre relay mark of 1:38.32 (April 1, 2023, at the Mike A. Myers Stadium in Austin, Texas, during the Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays era), and a 4×400-metre relay of 3:45.13 (May 14, 2022, at a meet in Kearney, Nebraska).
These relay marks in particular — placed at prestigious out-of-state spring invitationals in Michigan, Texas, and Nebraska — reflect the reach of her Trinidad Toby Sports Academy club program and the level at which she was competing even before she appeared on Wake Forest’s radar. An eighth grader or early high schooler competing on relay teams at the Texas Relays and running sub-12-second wind-aided 100-metre times as a freshman or sophomore is attracting college attention years before most athletes start receiving letters.
Choosing Wake Forest: An ACC Opportunity
When Savannah Simmons committed to Wake Forest University, she was selecting one of the most academically distinguished schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference — and a track and field program with a growing national profile under Director of Track and Cross Country John Hayes. Hayes had guided the Wake Forest cross country program to its first ACC title since 1994 in the fall of 2024, and the combined track program had been building toward sustained conference competitiveness. For a student-athlete who had already distinguished herself as a National Honor Society member with a Math award on her resume, Wake Forest’s academic environment was a natural fit. For a jumper with her profile, the ACC is an environment that will push her to the limit — which is precisely the right context for long-term development.
Wake Forest is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, roughly five hours from Alpharetta — far enough to represent a genuine departure from home, close enough to not feel entirely disconnected. The Demon Deacons’ track and field program competes at Kentner Stadium for outdoor meets and at the JDL Fast Track facility in Winston-Salem for major indoor competitions. Hayes and his coaching staff identified Simmons as a jumps prospect, and that’s the role she has inhabited in her first two collegiate seasons.
Freshman Season (2024-25): Building an ACC Foundation
Savannah Simmons opened her collegiate career in December of 2024, competing at back-to-back indoor meets in Winston-Salem. At the Visit Winston-Salem College Kick-off on December 7, 2024, she recorded a jump of 5.49 metres (18 feet, 0.25 inches) to place fourth in the long jump. The following day, at the JDL Early Bird Invitational on December 8, she improved to 5.56 metres (18 feet, 3 inches) for fifth place. Those opening marks — both over 18 feet in her first two collegiate competitions — established her immediately as a contributor in a Power Five long jump field.
The indoor regular season continued to build. She competed at the Virginia Tech Invitational in mid-January (5.25 metres), then arrived at the Gamecock Challenge in Columbia, South Carolina, on February 1-2, 2025, where she produced her best performance of the freshman indoor campaign: 5.81 metres (19 feet, 0.75 inches). That jump placed her fourth in the event field and earned her the No. 7 spot on Wake Forest’s all-time indoor long jump list — a program records list spanning decades of ACC competition. To crack a Power Five program’s all-time top-ten list as a freshman is a concrete marker of elite collegiate potential.
She continued competing through the remainder of the indoor season: 5.65 metres at the Doc Hale VT Meet in early February and 5.57 metres at the Darius Dixon Memorial Invitational on February 14-15, where she also ran her only documented indoor 200-metre time of 26.05 seconds. That sprint mark, run in an open 200-metre field at a college invitational, was competitive enough to be noted in the program’s official top-ten lists, and it confirmed that her runway speed for the long jump takeoff is genuine. She is a sprinter who jumps, which is the profile college coaches most want in their horizontal jumps athletes.
The Wake Forest program specifically cited the 5.81-metre Gamecock Challenge mark in its pre-ACC Championships reporting, listing Simmons among the athletes whose marks had landed in the program’s top-ten all-time indoor lists — meaningful recognition in a program with decades of ACC-level history.
The 2025 outdoor season opened at the Webb Davidson Meet Presented by Norris Woody in High Point, North Carolina, on March 21-22. Program reporting specifically noted that Simmons and graduate student Bridget McNally “showcased strong form” in the long jump, with Simmons leaping 5.66 metres (18 feet, 7 inches) to place fourth in the field. That outdoor opener was followed by appearances at the Raleigh Relays (5.51 metres, 20th), the Vertklasse Meet in High Point (5.55 metres, 18th), the Duke Invitational (5.64 metres, 10th), the Wake Forest Invitational (5.56 metres, 7th), the Charlotte Invitational (5.30 metres, 14th), and the Duke Twilight (5.55 metres, 10th).
The outdoor season marks show the typical pattern of a freshman navigating a full Power Five outdoor schedule for the first time — inconsistency in result from meet to meet, some strong performances mixed with ones that fall short of her best, and the overall profile of a young jumper still learning how to replicate her best efforts on a consistent basis. The range of 5.30 to 5.66 metres across the outdoor season tells that story honestly. The 5.66-metre opener at Webb Davidson, which matched her outdoor season best, demonstrated that she can jump well on the big outdoor stage. The work ahead lies in making that performance the floor rather than the ceiling.
Sophomore Season (2025-26): A Career-Best and Rising Trajectory
The sophomore indoor campaign opened on December 6-7, 2025, with back-to-back meets in Winston-Salem. At the Visit Winston-Salem College Kick-off, Simmons jumped 5.61 metres (18 feet, 5 inches) for fourth place. The following day at the JDL Early Bird Invitational, she improved to 5.63 metres (18 feet, 5.75 inches) for fifth place. Both marks were better than her comparable freshman-year opening results, signaling that she had spent the off-season improving.
The indoor campaign continued building through January and into February. The Mondo College Invitational in mid-January produced 5.42 metres. The Brant Tolsma Invite on January 30-31 brought 5.65 metres and a second-place finish. The Camel City Sprints on February 6 yielded 5.66 metres for eighth place. At the Darius Dixon Memorial on February 13-14, she reached 5.80 metres (19 feet, 0.5 inches) — her second-best collegiate mark to that point.
Then came the performance that defined her sophomore indoor season. At the ASICS Last Chance Invitational on February 21, 2026, Savannah Simmons jumped 5.88 metres — 19 feet, 3.5 inches — to place second in the competition. That is her collegiate personal best. It broke the previous career best of 5.81 metres she had set as a freshman and placed her even higher in Wake Forest’s program history. For context: 5.88 metres in the women’s collegiate indoor long jump is a serious mark. It is a distance that places a jumper in legitimate contention for ACC scoring at the conference indoor championships, and it represents the kind of individual-meet performance that signals an athlete beginning to translate her potential into documented results consistently.
The ACC Indoor Track and Field Championships, held February 26-28, 2026, produced a more modest result — 5.46 metres for 21st place in the final — a reminder that championship-meet consistency is a separate skill from peak-meet performance, and one that most collegiate athletes are still developing. The gap between a personal best at an invitational and competitive placement at a conference championship is a natural feature of the learning curve, and at 20 years old, Simmons has ample time to close it.
The 2026 outdoor season opened at the Bob Davidson Team Challenge on March 20-21, where she jumped 5.69 metres (18 feet, 8 inches) with a 2.7 metres-per-second tailwind for fifth place — a solid outdoor opener for her sophomore year. At the Raleigh Relays on March 26-28, she fouled in her best attempt of the competition (recording NM), which is a frustrating result but one that is part of the technical work of developing a consistent runway and takeoff approach. As of early April 2026, the outdoor season remains underway, and the opportunities to improve on that result are ahead.
The Event Profile: A True Sprinter-Jumper
What makes Savannah Simmons interesting as a long jump prospect is the foundation of flat sprinting speed that underlies her jumping. Her high school personal best in the 200 metres — competitive in the 25-second range — and the wind-aided 11.78 sprint from her early career establish that her approach run is generated by genuine speed, not just strength or technique alone. The long jump, at its highest level, is won or lost primarily on runway velocity. The athletes who eventually become elite are the ones who have both the runway speed and the technical takeoff mechanics to convert that speed into distance. Simmons’s sprint background from her high school years, where she competed seriously in the 100 and 200 alongside the long jump at every state meet she attended, gives her a foundation that purely technical jumpers lack.
Her club training through Trinidad Toby Sports Academy has sharpened the technical elements of her jumps work through her high school years, and the collegiate coaching environment at Wake Forest — under a staff that has developed multiple ACC-level competitors — is the right setting to continue that technical refinement. The progression from 5.49 metres as a collegiate opener in December 2024 to 5.88 metres at the ASICS Last Chance meet in February 2026 represents a career-best improvement of 39 centimetres across roughly 14 months of college competition. That rate of improvement is encouraging.
Academic Life at Wake Forest
Wake Forest University is a genuinely academically demanding institution — a school consistently ranked among the top 30 national universities in the United States, with programs that expect rigorous engagement from every student, including athletes. The fact that Simmons chose Wake Forest rather than a program with perhaps more track-focused infrastructure reflects an investment in the whole of her college experience, not just the athletic portion. Her high school academic record — National Honor Society, Vice President of the student body, Math award, multiple leadership roles — is the profile of a student who takes the academic dimension of collegiate life seriously. The academic environment at Wake Forest is one she chose deliberately.
Social Media and Public Profile
Savannah Simmons maintains an active presence on Instagram, where she can be found under her account connected to her Wake Forest athletics profile. Her World Athletics athlete code is 14721569, through which her officially registered personal bests and competition history are publicly trackable. As a Division I ACC athlete at a prominent national university, her visibility within the track and field community continues to grow as her results develop.
No confirmed sponsorship arrangements beyond her NCAA athletic scholarship at Wake Forest are documented in public records as of early 2026. Her NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) activity, if any, has not been publicly reported through accessible sources.
Looking Ahead
At twenty years old and in the middle of her sophomore outdoor season, Savannah Simmons is precisely where a developing ACC-level long jumper should be — accumulating competitive experience, producing career-best performances in the right contexts, and learning the difference between what she can do on her best day and what she can do consistently. The 5.88-metre indoor personal best from February 2026 is a meaningful data point. The next benchmarks to watch are whether she can replicate that distance outdoors, where the legal wind conditions and variable surfaces can either help or complicate a jumper’s results, and whether she can begin to perform closer to her peak at conference championships.
The ACC is not an easy conference for horizontal jumpers. Schools like Florida State, NC State, Virginia, and North Carolina field legitimate national-level jump programs. For a Georgia girl from a small private school classification who opened her collegiate career at 5.49 metres in December 2024 and was posting 5.88 metres fourteen months later, the curve is pointing in exactly the right direction. Her sprint background, her technical foundation from Trinidad Toby, and her four years of Georgia state-meet experience in multiple events mean she arrives at every competition with more than just one tool in her kit.
The story of Savannah Simmons is still in its early chapters. A kid from Alpharetta who walked into the Mount Pisgah Christian School track program as a freshman and proceeded to spend four years placing, earning trophies, and qualifying for national meets has grown into a sophomore Demon Deacon who broke into her program’s all-time top-ten list in her first year and set a new personal best in year two. Whatever the specific distances and finishes look like over the next two-plus seasons, the direction of travel is clear.
Career at a Glance
- Full Name: Savannah Simmons
- Date of Birth: January 15, 2006
- Hometown: Alpharetta, Georgia
- High School: Mount Pisgah Christian School (Johns Creek, GA)
- Club: Trinidad Toby Sports Academy
- College: Wake Forest University (NCAA Division I, ACC)
- Year: Sophomore (2025–26)
- Events: Long Jump (primary); 100m, 200m (sprints background)
- Parents: Kim and Reggie Simmons
- Sibling: Brother Winston
- World Athletics Code: 14721569
Collegiate Personal Bests
- Long Jump (indoor): 5.88m (19′ 3.5″) — ASICS Last Chance Invitational, February 21, 2026 (career best)
- Long Jump (outdoor): 5.69m (18′ 8″) — Bob Davidson Team Challenge, March 20-21, 2026
- 200m (indoor): 26.05 — Darius Dixon Memorial Invitational, February 14-15, 2025
Collegiate Season Highlights
- No. 7 all-time Wake Forest indoor long jump list (5.81m, 2025 — since surpassed by her own 5.88m PR)
- Career best 5.88m (2nd place, ASICS Last Chance Invitational, February 2026)
- ACC Indoor Championships competitor (2026)
- Multiple top-five finishes in ACC-level long jump competition across two seasons
High School Highlights (Mount Pisgah Christian School)
- GHSA Class A Division 1 Long Jump State Champion (career)
- New Balance Nationals Outdoor qualifier (long jump, senior year)
- Top-8 Indoor Adidas Nationals, long jump (club, senior year)
- Senior year state meet: 2nd long jump (18’2″), 3rd 200m (25.87), 4th 100m (12.37 prelim), 3rd 4×400 relay
- Junior year state meet: 3rd long jump, top-8 100m, top-5 200m, 2nd 4×100 relay
- Sophomore year: top-8 state long jump
- Freshman year: 2nd state 4×100 relay, 5th state 100m, 2nd state 200m
- National Honor Society; Vice President, student body; Director of DEI Club (Iron Club); Math Award; Senior Leadership Council; Student Ambassador
Full Collegiate Competition Log (TFRRS)
2024 Indoor Season (Freshman opener)
- Visit Winston-Salem College Kick-off (Dec 7, 2024): LJ 5.49m — 4th
- JDL Early Bird Invitational (Dec 8, 2024): LJ 5.56m — 5th
2025 Indoor Season (Freshman)
- Virginia Tech Invitational (Jan 17-18, 2025): LJ 5.25m — 17th
- Gamecock Challenge (Feb 1-2, 2025): LJ 5.81m — 4th (career best at time; No. 7 all-time WFU indoor)
- Doc Hale VT Meet (Feb 7-8, 2025): LJ 5.65m — 8th
- Darius Dixon Memorial Invitational (Feb 14-15, 2025): LJ 5.57m — 17th; 200m 26.05 — 46th
2025 Outdoor Season (Freshman)
- Webb Davidson Meet (Mar 21-22, 2025): LJ 5.66m (+2.6) — 5th
- Raleigh Relays (Mar 27-29, 2025): LJ 5.51m (+1.6) — 20th
- Vertklasse 2025 (Apr 4-5, 2025): LJ 5.55m (+1.5) — 18th
- Duke Invitational (Apr 10-12, 2025): LJ 5.64m (+1.1) — 10th
- Wake Forest Invitational (Apr 17-18, 2025): LJ 5.56m (-3.2) — 7th
- Charlotte Invitational (Apr 25-26, 2025): LJ 5.30m (+0.0) — 14th
- Duke Twilight (May 4, 2025): LJ 5.55m (+1.3) — 10th
2025-26 Indoor Season (Sophomore)
- Visit Winston-Salem College Kick-off (Dec 6, 2025): LJ 5.61m — 4th
- JDL Early Bird Invitational (Dec 7, 2025): LJ 5.63m — 5th
- Mondo College Invitational (Jan 17, 2026): LJ 5.42m — 8th
- Brant Tolsma Invite (Jan 30-31, 2026): LJ 5.65m — 2nd
- Camel City Sprints (Feb 6, 2026): LJ 5.66m — 8th
- Darius Dixon Memorial (Feb 13-14, 2026): LJ 5.80m — 12th
- ASICS Last Chance Invitational (Feb 21, 2026): LJ 5.88m — 2nd (career best)
- ACC Indoor Track & Field Championships (Feb 26-28, 2026): LJ 5.46m — 21st
2026 Outdoor Season (Sophomore, in progress)
- Bob Davidson Team Challenge (Mar 20-21, 2026): LJ 5.69m (+2.7) — 5th
- Raleigh Relays (Mar 26-28, 2026): LJ — FOUL (NM)
