This Charlotte sprinter is just starting high school. ‘She’s already a legend.’
If you didn’t know Zhoe Holt was the star of the Charlotte Heat Track Club by looking at the organization’s homepage — where a photo of her is spotlighted in the lead position — just mention her name to those in her orbit.
“She’s nationally ranked, everyone knows her name,” says Heat teammate Kaylee Dobbins. “Social media has kind of blown her up.”
“The stuff she’s done, people are gonna be talking about for decades,” says William Bullard, who founded the club 20 years ago and has helped coach its kids to more than 60 AAU Junior Olympic national titles in the past 10.
Then Christian Hall, a volunteer assistant with the Heat (and father of another girl on the team who is a rising star in her own right) takes the praise to the next level. “Zhoe,” he proclaims, “literally is the fastest person in the history of the planet.”
He is, truth be told, getting a little carried away. But it’s not hard to get excited about a phenom like Holt.
In this case, Hall is hyperbolically referring to the world record for 12-year-old girls that Zhoe set in June of last year at the adidas Track & Field Nationals meet in Greensboro, where she clocked a blistering 11.58 seconds in the 100 meters. Two months ago, at the 2025 adidas meet, she ran 11.47 (missing the world record for 13-year-old girls by just .08).
For frame of reference, the fastest high-school girls’ 100 recorded in North Carolina in 2025 so far is 11.43.
Breathe that in for a moment: As a newly minted middle-school graduate, Zhoe put up a time at the adidas meet that makes her faster at that distance this year than all but two female high-school sprinters in the state.
Then how’s this for an August? To begin the month, Zhoe made it look easy at the AAU Junior Olympics in Houston, Texas, notching national age-group titles in the 100 and the 200, along with a third with the Heat’s 4x100 relay team, as anchor. To end it, she’ll turn 14. And in between, on Wednesday, she officially enters the freshman ranks at Bradford Preparatory School in Charlotte.
Expectations for the next several years of her athletic career are bordering on being impossibly high.
“No doubt, if she stays healthy,” Bullard says, “she’ll be running in the SEC, which is the best track and field conference in the country. And I have no doubt that she’ll be in the Olympic trials, probably on the Olympic team. … She’s running faster (at her age) than some girls who have been in the Olympics (were at her age). …
“If she stops right now and never runs track again, she’s already a legend.”
But as she continues to put up freakishly fast times in the high-profile sprinting events, Zhoe and her family have also learned that while being a legend comes with plenty of pleasures — not the least of which is a strong bond with a small group of other all-star-caliber Heat girls — such status also can yield its pains.
Humble starts with Charlotte Heat
Zhoe started with the club at about age 4, having followed in big sister Zariya’s footsteps, if somewhat under protest. “I cried and cried,” Zhoe says, “every meet, every practice, saying I didn’t wanna do it no more.”
Around the same time, Mylan Clay was signed up for the Heat by her parents Mike and MJ, who were growing weary of constantly needing to chase down their daughter when they were out in public. “They put me in track,” Mylan says, “to get some of the energy out.”
Sakeenah Odom-Pollard, meanwhile, wasn’t officially on the team at that point, but at age 3 was also shadowing an older sibling — much more willingly than Zhoe. Her mother, Rhonda Odom-Pollard, describes Sakeenah as having “come out the womb running,” and says she was floored the day her toddler-daughter took it upon herself to run a full mile around the track at Mallard Creek High School, where the Heat practices; Sakeenah, too, became a club member at 4.
Kaylee Dobbins and Christina Hall (daughter of volunteer assistant Christian) joined those three on the Heat when they were closer to 7 or 8, with Kaylee moving over from another local club and Christina from flag football.
The five became fast friends, both figuratively and literally.
There was the general closeness in age from the beginning, with just over a year separating the oldest (Kaylee) from the youngest (Sakeenah, who is one school grade below the other four). Three — Christina, Kaylee and Sakeenah — have all been together at Cannon School in Concord since kindergarten; and three — Christina, Kaylee and Mylan — reside within just a few miles of one another in Harrisburg, while Zhoe and Sakeenah both live in the northeast quadrant of Charlotte.
On top of that, four of the five have been included in various iterations of a 4x100 relay that has made Heat success routine.
In 2023, Sakeenah got a share of her first national title with Zhoe and Christina (and Jordan Vaden) thanks to that event. In 2024, Kaylee was a national runner-up for the first time after teaming with Zhoe and Christina (and Jala Webster-Jackson). And this summer, Zhoe and Christina climbed back up to the top of the podium, with Madison Worley and Kennedy Hall.
(This most recent showing, in fact, has to be seen to be believed: With Sakeenah resting due to a minor injury and Kaylee taking the summer off from track, Zhoe singlehandedly secured victory via an anchor-leg charge that took the squad from last to first.)
At the same time, each girl has distinctive skills. While Zhoe is the clear superstar of the bunch, they’re all standouts. Mylan, 13, is a hurdling national champ, Christina, 13, is a long-jumping national champ, and newly-14 Kaylee and newly-13 Sakeenah are multi-sport athletes — explosive sprinters who also play basketball and volleyball.
Talk to their parents, and they’ll tell you there’s a lot of natural talent here. They also all agree the Heat coaching has been superb. You could reasonably argue, however, that these girl also owe some of their success to each other.
“Even though they’re friends, even though they’re on the same team,” says Mylan’s dad Mike, who used to be an assistant with the Heat, “it created a competitive practice environment. Nobody wanted to lose to anybody. So, it kept everybody motivated and hungry.”
Kaylee agrees — sort of: “I wouldn’t say it’s competitive, just more, ‘Let me show, like, hey, I’m also on Zhoe’s team.’ I just always want to keep up with her standards.
“But that also pushes me, because I want to stand out, too.”
‘It’s like the Beatles coming to town’
On an unseasonably warm early-March afternoon, Christina, Kaylee and Sakeenah moved through their track and field team’s home meet at Cannon looking almost out of place.
That was perhaps truest when it was time for the middle-school girls to compete, with Christina cruising to an easy victory in the 100 — against a field that included several boys — and Kaylee and Sakeenah joining Christina as three-fourths of a 4x100 relay that dominated many of those same boys.
But the three girls didn’t just stand out in the standings. They also seemed to turn heads because of ... something that’s harder to pinpoint. Maybe “aura” is the best way to describe it?
Kaylee smiles at the suggestion.
“I love the word aura,” she says. She loves, she continues, how when she and her teammates show up at a track, “people sort of gravitate toward us, or try to look at us. It feels good. It feels good when all eyes are on us ... when people know what we can do.”
Her, Christina’s and Sakeenah’s accomplishments at Cannon have been remarkable. They hold a variety of all-time school records. It’s with the Heat, however, that they’ve made splashes beyond the Carolinas. Along with Mylan and Zhoe, they comprised a nucleus Bullard — the Heat head coach — says “will probably go down as the most successful group of athletes I’ve ever had that are all around the same age.”
And when they show up at adidas Track & Field Nationals, or AAU National Club Championships, or AAU Junior Olympics, the Heat’s female stars have more than just an aura.
They have a fan club.
Other kids, even other parents and other coaches, fawn, swoon, ask for photos, upon recognizing them from clips highlighting Heat stars on track-and-field-geek platforms like FloTrack and MileSplit. “Man,” Bullard says, “it’s almost like the Beatles coming to town when we go to these track meets.”
But while it seems Zhoe will stay on as its de facto leader, the Heat’s girl group has begun to break up.
When Mylan repeated as her age group’s national champ in the 100-meter hurdles, for example, she did so this year for a different club — True Runners, which is coached by former App State hurdler Phillip Bush. (Bush also was a big reason the Clays pursued moving Mylan from Hickory Ridge in Cabarrus County to Corvian, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg charter; in addition to coaching True, Bush is head coach at Corvian, where he led the boys to a 1A state championship while the girls finished as runners-up.)
And as all but rising eighth-grader Sakeenah make the big leap to high school this month, more change could be on the way.
Kaylee, for instance, wasn’t available to run the 4x100 at the AAU Junior Olympics this month because she decided to focus for the summer on volleyball. She says she could see someday switching to full-time, and while her parents love the Heat, they’d be all for the move.
“After you graduate,” says her dad, William, “there’s more pressure on you, more weight on your shoulders. So I try to tell her, ‘You’ll have the rest of your life to be an adult. Enjoy being a kid.’”
That can be easier said than done, though, especially if you’re a kid trying to put an extraordinary athletic ability on display.
The joys and pains of social media
At 14 years old, Kaylee doesn’t have any social media yet, and she seems fine with that. “I feel like that’s also a good thing, just keeping myself kind of in this bubble, so not a lot of people can comment or judge on whatever I do.”
Sakeenah, meanwhile, could hardly wait. Ahead of her Instagram debut — which coincided with her 13th birthday in July — she’d mocked up a rendering of an Instagram account to show her mother Rhonda how she wanted to design it. Rhonda approved. “Basically, we’re just gonna tell her story,” says Mom, who pauses before adding, “It will, of course, bring attention that I know will not always be positive.”
Zhoe and her family are well aware of this. They also have come to know that because she is so extraordinarily talented, the negative attention she’s been subjected to is always likely to be commensurate.
Twaini Holt, Zhoe’s mom, says they started an Instagram profile for her to showcase her daughter’s accomplishments for recruiters. But while they’ve had plenty of great news to share of late (in addition to winning her fifth straight 100-meter national title with that 11.47 and a share of the 4x100 crown, she gold-medaled in the 200 for her age), the account has also been something of a hornet’s nest.
The worst of it? Baseless accusations, from commenters who claim she and her parents are lying about her age, or that she’s doping.
Zhoe just shrugs. “They don’t know me. ‘You don’t know me, so I really don’t care.’”
Although it’s hard to tell whether she’s truly that unfazed, her mother is much easier to read.
“We teach her to never reply. ‘Don’t feed into it.’ But as a mom, it hurts. You know, that’s my child. It hurts,” Twaini says. She inhales sharply through her nose and then exhales slowly. “I’m getting emotional now thinking about it. Like, why would they say that about a child? A good student, good grades, who’s running track for fun and loves what she does — and grown people come on there to attack a child.”
She tsks-tsks, shakes her head. “Like, I don’t know.”
But the joy of seeing Zhoe answer her critics with an OMG performance like that worst-to-first anchor-leg run at the AAU Junior Olympics in Houston this summer makes it easier to stomach the internet trolls.
Twaini also is tickled every time she runs into starstruck members of The Zhoe Army when they’re at the big-time meets.
“I never imagined in a million years that we’d go to different states and hear people around us saying, ‘Is that Zhoe?’ And I’m like, ‘Are they whispering your name?’ All these people in Florida, in Texas, who want to meet Zhoe …
“It’s just mind-blowing.”
Then again, had you ever heard of Zhoe Holt before five minutes ago? Or Christina Hall? Mylan Clay, Kaylee Dobbins or Sakeenah Odom-Pollard?
To their parents, the idea that the vast majority of people in the Charlotte area don’t is somewhat mind-blowing, too.
How these girls deal with the boys
If they were nationally ranked football players, Zhoe’s dad Cedric says, “they’d be all over the TV, all over the news.”
“If she was a boy, (Zhoe would) be in Sports Illustrated,” says Christian Hall, Christina’s father.
“The boys, they can be halfway decent and the school’s putting ’em on a pedestal. But these girls — I mean, they’re the equivalent of five-star football or basketball athletes. They’re not just competing, they’re winning national championships. But it’s still an uphill battle to even get the lowest level of recognition, right. And they all live right down the street from each other!”
When prompted about this particular issue, Rhonda Odom-Pollard, Sakeenah’s mom, simply bends her elbows and turns her palms up. “That is the world that we live in,” she says.
So the girls have settled for taking the satisfaction that comes not from an equal amount of publicity to their male counterparts, but from beating the shorts off the boys at any and every opportunity.
Like at Cannon back in March.
“They got upset,” Kaylee’s mom, Deanna, says of the boys post-race. Kaylee laughs. “Yeah. It was just amusing to me. That was definitely my favorite part of the middle-school season this year: beating them time after time.”
That’ll happen less in high school, where the genders aren’t blended like they are at some middle-school meets. But there’s still the Heat.
At practices, says Bullard, the club’s coach, boys and girls aren’t discouraged from lining up for the same reps. He says in the past, he’s found it funny when boys have insisted, “I don’t lose to no girls” — and then get blown out by his girls. They seem to have mostly learned their lesson, though.
“The older high school boys,” Bullard says, “they don’t even want to line up next to the girls anymore.
“Because they already know what’s gonna happen.”
