Illinois Year in Review | Female Athlete of the Year Rose Yeboah

CHAMPAIGN — The turning point in Rose Yeboah’s first season at Illinois? It was actually leaving Champaign.

A return home to Ghana in mid-March for the 2024 African Games provided the spark Yeboah needed to transition from a successful indoor season to a dominant run outdoors for the Illini women’s track and field team.

Yeboah won the high jump at the African Games by clearing 6 feet, 23/4 inches — her best effort since joining Illinois. More wins started stacking up after she returned to the United States.

First place at the 64th Annual Mt. SAC Relays in Walnut, Calif., in mid-April. First place at the Fighting Illini Tuneup at Demirjian Park n Champaign the first Saturday in May. First place at the Big Ten outdoor championship a week later in Ann Arbor, Mich. First place at the NCAA West Regional in late May in Fayetteville, Ark.

Then the big one on June 8 in Eugene, Ore.

A national championship — the first by Illinois in the high jump — at historic Hayward Field with a program and meet record mark of 6-51/2 that also meant reaching the Olympic standard and securing a spot, representing Ghana, later this month when the Summer Olympics get underway in Paris.

Clearly a season worth of performances befitting The News-Gazette’s choice as the Illinois Female Athlete of the Year for the 2023-24 school year.

“Coming in obviously was a big change for her coming from a different continent,” Illinois director of track and field and cross-country Petros Kyprianou told The News-Gazette this week. “New food. New coaching. New everything. It was a bit of a shaky start for her in the beginning. The breakthrough was when we sent her off to the African Games. ... The African Games is a big deal for them. Winning that, for her, was like, ‘I’m for real. All of this training is starting to pay off.’”

That training was also a difference-maker. Yeboah arrived in Champaign with a solid high jump pedigree as the 2021 and 2022 African champion.

That didn’t mean there weren’t improvements to be made with tweaks to her technique. A process Kyprianou said usually takes years that Yeboah handled in four months.

The technical development was all in Yeboah’s approach to her jump. A little more speed running her curve.

“It’s not like the long jump or pole vault or triple jump where there’s straight linear speed and acceleration,” Kyprianou said. “You have to really be in the right position to prevent all the centrifugal forces pulling you out of the curve. You’ve got to have that lean. That’s how you accelerate. It’s a lot more technical and understanding how you’ve got to run fast on a curve, but hit that hinge moment where you lean back and hit that takeoff. There’s a lot of biomechanics nuances that put athletes in a huge advantage if they do it right and also a huge disadvantage if they don’t do it right.”

Yeboah did it right. Particularly on that Saturday night in June in Eugene, Ore., among some serious competition. Yeboah wasn’t the only high jumper to hit the Olympic standard at the NCAA championship. She had to fend off Georgia’s Elena Kulichenko and Texas Tech’s Temitope Adeshina, who both also cleared 6-5 1/2.

“It speaks volumes to her, her development and her focus,” Kyprianou said. “This is what we’ve been talking about since day one — recruiting athletes like that. I don’t care where they’re from. They’ve just got to have that ‘it’ factor. It makes me feel so much better the hours we put in going across the world to find them. You’ve got to find that ‘it’ factor, and Rose has it.”