Daily Journal Athlete of the Week: Menlo-Atherton’s Jacob Roeder

Menlo-Atherton sprinter Jacob Roeder hit the trifecta as he dashed to the Peninsula Athletic League championship in the boys’ 100 meters Saturday at Sequoia High School. The senior has been named Daily Journal Athlete of the Week after breaking the 32-year-old M-A program record with a first-place time of 10.67 seconds, topping Brent Vartan’s time of 10.69 set in 1994 — a historic feat Roeder learned from the public address announcement at Terremere Field as he was gasping for breath during the follow-through of the race.

“I heard it,” Roeder said. “Because, also, I was trying to win it. It’s PAL finals, so I was already excited after winning. Then I hear the time, I just got really excited. I kind of blacked out. I don’t really remember a lot.”

M-A assistant coach Deon Hawkins had supreme faith long before the race started. Roeder, in his first full year dedicated to track and field, told Hawkins early in the preseason he was on a mission to chase down the M-A records in both the 100 and 200. It was a tall order, as Roeder’s personal record following his junior season — spent as a two-sport athlete, with his focus then on football as a standout wide receiver — was a mere 11.13.

Roeder had put in the work, though. He broke into the 10s for the first time March 21 at the St. Francis Invitational with an eighth-place finish of 10.86, and recorded times of 10.92 and 10.96 in late April. So, Hawkins’ biggest concern going into the PAL finals wasn’t about Roeder, but about the weather holding up for race day.

The first thing Hawkins did Saturday morning upon waking up at his Menlo Park home was to hurry outside and check the weather. That’s when M-A’s 10th-year sprints coach knew.

“I’m like: ‘Perfect day,’” Hawkins said. “‘Sun is shining, it’s warm, not cold ... no wind, sun out, 70 degrees. Perfect day to break a record.’”

Roeder is in his third year on the M-A track team, but never trained for a full school year prior to his senior season. As a junior with the M-A football team, he totaled 523 receiving yard and seven touchdown catches.

Then a hamstring injury cut into his 2025 track season, keeping him out of action until April 16, 2025, two weeks prior to the postseason. He did enough to qualify for the Central Coast Section championships, taking fifth place in the 100 at the PAL finals. At the section meet, he finished 20th in the preliminaries and did not qualify for the 100 finals.

Still intent on playing two sports heading into his senior year, Roeder totaled just three games on the varsity gridiron. He made 10 catches for 129 yards, including four receptions Sept. 11 in the Bears’ 35-0 loss to Mitty. However, two weeks prior, in M-A’s Aug. 29 season opener at Destiny Christian-Sacramento, Roeder got his bell rung and didn’t tell anyone he was suffering from concussion symptoms.

As the symptoms persisted, Roeder decided to quit the football team less than halfway through the season.

“Everything worked out in the end,” Roeder said.

Roeder made a quick pivot, reporting for fall workouts with the M-A track team in October. It’s the first time he had ever focused exclusively on track, and informed Hawkins straightaway of his goal become the greatest sprinter in M-A history.

“That was a tremendous amount of pressure because I’d never had a student tell me that,” Hawkins said. “That was part of the reason I coached him is because of his belief in me, even though it was a lot of pressure.”

So, come the day of the PAL finals, Hawkins distanced himself from track infield, from where he typically views races. Instead, he climbed to the top row of the bleachers, more to get a panoramic view of the race in order to observe Roeder’s performance and better instruct the senior going forward.

“We’re starting to run out of real estate,” Hawkins said. “It was today or maybe next week, and that’s it. And he never lost his faith. That’s something I had to continue to encourage him: ‘You’ve got it in you ... and if you can execute it effectively in a race, the clock is going to say what you want it to say.’”

Hawkins was in good company from his bird’s-eye view in the bleachers, watching the race alongside his son, Deston. It was a special day for Deston, a former M-A and Syracuse University running back, who Saturday made his first return to Terremere Field since 2018, when he was a senior on the M-A football team that won the CIF Division 3-AA state championship on that very field.

While the opening gun was still echoing, Hawkins knew, bases simply on the fluid start, Roeder was going to outperform the field. Roeder himself, despite running in lane 4 as the top seed, was not so sure.

“My starts are not that great,” Roeder said. “That’s just how I’m built; I’m a top-end runner. So, my whole goal was to get out on their hip, so then I can be close enough that I could close on them. And I did that successfully. ... There’s actually two guys that had better starts than me.”

Those top guys — El Camino junior Nathan Nand and Hillsdale junior Christian Salamanca — fulfilled another important variable, giving Roeder someone to chase. They took the early lead, and Nand was still out front with 10 meters to go.

“You can ask any track athlete, you run faster when you’re chasing someone, or when someone’s next to you,” Roeder said. “It just adds a little intensity that you can only get from that. So, if I wasn’t running against them, I probably wouldn’t have broken the record.”

Roeder still has work to do. The M-A record for the 200 of 21.67 still belongs to Vartan, set in 1993. Roeder ran a personal record 21.78 in Saturday’s finals to win a second PAL championship. Nand took second in that race as well, though Roeder finished with a more comfortable gap, as the El Camino junior finished in 22.03.

At the finish line of the 100, it was neck-and-neck, with Roeder out-legging Nand by two one-hundredths of a second.

“Close,” Roeder said. “[Nand] ran 10.71. He’s a great runner. If I didn’t run my best race, he definitely would have beat me.”