BELOIT—The first thing that Beloit College runner Candis Damtse does before every race is take a look at the heat sheet and make a note of who is faster than her.
Any unfortunate soul whose name happens to appear above the senior sprinter is all but doomed to become the track star’s latest victim.
“When I go to the start line for a race, (I want) people to be scared of me because I'm competitive,” Damtse said.
With the way Damtse has been running this year, it isn’t a stretch to think that her competition would have the same frightful feeling they would get from seeing Michael Meyers or Freddy Krueger when it’s time to race her.
“I know I can gauge on someone (faster than me),” she continued. “But for most of this season, I've been the fastest seed. So, I have to just keep going. I treat it like I'm in practice. We're on an interval and my coach is yelling, 'Get out, come on!' And I'm like, 'Okay, I gotta go, gotta go.
“I also don't save anything. At the end of the day, you're going to be tired at the end of the race. So just give it your all.”
With the Midwest Conference Championships set to begin on Friday at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, Damtse holds the conference’s best time in both the 200 and 400-meter dashes.
“We've got a simple recipe that you get out what you put in,” Buccaneers' track head coach Brian Bliese said. “If you work hard and do the things that you should, kids get better. Candis has blossomed. She trains right, eats right, lifts the right way, pays attention to warm up and cool down. She's very competitive and is continually getting faster each year. I don't think she's hit her ceiling yet.”
Damtse’s time of 24.90 seconds in the 200 is the fastest in the MWC and 0.4 seconds better than Eva Carchidi of Grinnell, who is in second. Her time in the 400 was dominant with her finish in 56.88 seconds a whole 2.28 seconds faster than Carchidi.
“It’s been scary and overwhelming,” Damtse said of her recent success. “I’m seeing myself actually doing the things that I said I would do, which I felt like I was delusional saying it then. Actually seeing it come into play — I'm so grateful for everything. I'm proud of myself for committing and sacrificing everything that I did for this season.”
And Damtse’s dominant times don’t stop there.
The senior is also third in the conference in the 100 (12.31) and has helped the Bucs’ 4x400 relay, which she runs with Sophia Miller, Jaeonie Echols and Alayna Furch, rank first in the MWC with a time of 3:59.60. The second best is Ripon with a time of 4:04.85.
The 4x100 team of Darcel Royster, Furch, Damtse and Hannah Welte is second in the MWC (49.43).
And Damtse is peaking at the perfect time as both her top times came this past at the University of Dubuque in the Battle in the Bluffs. Her best 100 time was two weekends ago at St. Norbert’s Invitational.
“It was great conditions last week and she dropped a lot of time,” Bliese said. “Nationally, she’s at 43rd in the 200 and 38th in the 400. She needs to drop another 8/10th of a second in the 400 if she wants to go to nationals, and that's her goal. Nationals are in Myrtle Beach, and that's the training site where we've been two of the past three years on our spring break trip. So, she'd like to get back to Myrtle Beach and run in the big dance.”
Not bad for someone who didn’t start running until her sophomore year in Beloit.
Damtse was born in the United States and moved to Ghana, where her parents had been born, at seven-years-old.
“I never ran track a day of my life,” Damtse said. “When I was in elementary school, we used to have these field days where there were running events and I would always run for my team, but never competitively.”
Damtse attended Mfantsiman Girls Senior High, an all-girls boarding school in Accra, Ghana. She found out about Beloit College through an SAT prep teacher, who also recommended a few other smaller schools in the US.
“Beloit was one of the schools that accepted me and gave me the most funding,” she said. “I could see that they wanted me and I had the diversity I was looking for at Beloit. It's a small knit community.”
A friend encouraged Damtse to join the track and field team with them, but she declined, citing a desire to be a “normal student.”
“I got bored real fast,” she said. “And so my sophomore year, I went to go see Coach Bliese and I was like, ‘Hey, I want to run.’”
Damtse made it through the indoor season before a stress fracture in both of her shins knocked her out of the outdoor season.
“I was getting better and I was like, 'I know I could do so much better. I'm going to go rehab all summer, all fall and come back again, go at it,’” she said. “And we had some really good, inspirational people on the team as well. So, I would also say the community kept me here.”
Bliese said that Damtse’s success may have been a bit hidden in her junior season due to the fact she was behind two phenomenal senior sprinters in T’Aira Boyance and Jordyn McDonald, who Damtse cited as big catalysts in helping her succeed by making her better both on and off the track.
“She had a couple teammates that are very competitive,” Bliese added. “And she blended right in.”
Damtse was a force her junior year on the conference-winning 4x400 team and had some strong individual finishes throughout the season, but Bliese knew she had the potential to be the best sprinter in the MWC.
“Bliese told me at the end of last season that I could be in T’Aira’s shoes or even better if I wanted to,” Damtse said. “He told me you're not going to hit a wall, you're going to only get faster from here.”
A strong offseason where Damtse continued to lift and strengthened her body, without doing any running as to not suffer from burnout, helped her make the jump to the success she is seeing this season.
“I sacrificed so many things like weekends and my social life,” she added. “I'm staying focused.”
Damtse won this year’s MWC 200 and 400 indoor titles, and her focus has quickly turned to doing the same in the outdoor season.
“I'm really nervous,” she said. “I have a lot of events because we have trials for every race. I am hoping to break all of my PRs in every event that I do. And it's also going to be the first time my parents actually see me run, they’re coming from Ghana. So, I'm excited to have fun and show them what I can do.”
After this season? Damtse has options. Due to COIVD-19 eligibility rules she could return to the Bucs for one more season. Or the business management major with a mathematics minor could attend Rice University, where she has been accepted to pursue her master’s in accounting.
“Getting towards the end of this season, I'm like, if this is what I've been able to do within the past year, I know that I could do way, way better,” she said. “And also the opportunity for me to go explore more in my field before actually committing to a career has me thinking I'm going to come back in the fall.”
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