‘It felt like home.’ Why star runner continued Rupp family legacy with commitment to UK.
When Anna Rupp was still an aspiring distance runner, she went to the Kentucky Horse Park and saw her future in motion.
Rupp went to go see the best cross country runners in the Southeastern Conference compete at the league’s championship meet and made a resolution that she would be in their shoes one day. It became Rupp’s goal to compete as a Division I runner, in one of the nation’s most prestigious conferences and against the best athletes.
It’s a dream now realized for Rupp, a former star runner at Lexington Christian Academy, who this month announced her commitment to the Kentucky cross country and track and field programs.
And by realizing a lifetime goal of hers at UK, Rupp is helping continue her family’s synonymous relationship with the university, city and state they call home.
Anna is the great-granddaughter of Adolph Rupp, the former Kentucky men’s basketball coach whose last name adorns one of the most iconic arenas in college basketball and one of the most well-known landmarks in the state.
“Since I’ve been really young, I’ve kind of understood like how important Kentucky is to the state as a whole and it’s just really an honor to wear across my chest ‘Kentucky’ because it’s just been so impactful to Lexington,” Rupp told the Herald-Leader. “I know that all my friends in Lexington absolutely love UK and so it’s just really fun to actually be able to put that on and represent that because it’s so much bigger than myself.”
Before Rupp could make the choice to continue her athletic career at Kentucky, she had to leave the place that had been such a large part of her identity.
Rupp was a standout at LCA, winning consecutive KHSAA cross country Class A state titles in 2018 and 2019 as a freshman and sophomore.
She also won the 3,200-meter state title as a freshman during the KHSAA Class A Track Championship in 2019.
“In all honesty, she had really good work, good training, good workouts, but nothing that jumped off the page,” said Tom Stickel, the cross country and track and field coach at LCA. “But when she lined up for a race, you knew you were going to get top performance and she always wanted to run against the top competition. The bigger the race, the better she ran.”
But then came the challenges associated with being a burgeoning athlete in the presence of the coronavirus.
Rupp wasn’t able to compete in track during her sophomore season because of the COVID-19 pandemic. While she tried to simulate that track season through workouts as best she could, she admitted it was difficult to continue to work without the promise of actual races.
As a junior in the fall of 2020, Rupp pulled up in the middle of the state championship cross country race and didn’t finish the event.
Rupp was then injured for all but one race during her junior year track season.
This all added up to a junior year without as much success as Rupp said she wanted.
“Running is a very difficult sport and it is not always easy to stick with,” Rupp said. “You might have months where you just don’t feel the best, you don’t run the best, you might have a season where you don’t get any better. And I’ve had a season like that and it definitely makes it difficult to stick to.”
“I think she knows when she’s healthy . . . she can accomplish a lot of things,” Stickel said. “She’s very determined to be at a high level.”
So she made a change.
‘It felt right’
Rupp left LCA and is now at IMG Academy — a well-known boarding school with a focus on athletic training in Bradenton, Florida, — for her senior year, a decision Rupp called “absolutely the best decision that I’ve made.”
“My reason for going to IMG was honestly to experience something completely new,” Rupp said. “I had grown up in Lexington, gone to school in Lexington my entire life and when the opportunity presented itself to go to IMG, go to boarding school, develop more independence and of course it’d be in the Sunshine State which has been lovely. I absolutely jumped on that because I wanted to have a completely new experience.”
It took leaving home for Rupp to realize what she missed most about Kentucky, Lexington and her family’s distinct ties to UK.
“I miss being close to UK. Honestly, I love the football games, I love the basketball games . . . I’ve honestly just missed being close to Kentucky and being in Lexington,” Rupp said. “I love the town. Really, I’ve just kind of missed everything and I can’t wait to be back.”
While Rupp said that “no one bleeds blue more than I do,” she said being away at IMG Academy allowed her to evaluate UK as an athletic destination more objectively after she was contacted by Hakon Devries, who coaches UK’s distance runners.
Rupp came back to Lexington for a weekend in October and met with Devries, along with her parents, to learn more about UK as a program.
“I was able to focus solely on the program, listen to Coach Devries and kind of how he trains his athletes and really focus on Kentucky track and field,” Rupp said. “Not anything else. Not who in my family had gone there, what my history is with that. I’m a runner, so focus on the track program and the cross country program.”
Rupp said she told Devries that she would verbally commit to Kentucky in October, right before she left Lexington again to return to IMG.
Since then, a day hasn’t gone by when she hasn’t remembered that her longtime goal will soon become reality.
“I think when I put the Kentucky jersey on, I don’t know it just felt normal,” Rupp said. “It felt like home and it didn’t feel like, ‘oh, this is weird’ or ‘this doesn’t feel right.’ It felt right and I’m so excited.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 10:05 AM.
