Shane Cohen thought his track days were done. Now he’s an NCAA champ headed for the Olympic trials

As Virginia runner Shane Cohen rounded the final turn in the men’s 800-meter final at the NCAA outdoor track and field championships, something incredible happened.

Cohen, who sat dead last out of nine runners with 100 meters to go, kicked it into another gear last Friday in Eugene, Ore. He curled around the outside of the pack, usurped Indiana’s stumbling Camden Marshall, and ran the final straight of the race from the fourth lane.

“Let’s go, let’s go, make your move!” yelled Steve Cohen, Shane’s father. The Cohen family was watching the race from home in Huntingdon Valley, where Shane grew up and attended Lower Moreland High School.

Shane must have heard his father. Without time for the event’s commentators to recognize him until 30 meters remained, Cohen stormed past the other seven competitors and crossed the finish line as a national champion. He clocked a personal-best time of 1 minute, 44.97 seconds, good for seventh-best in the U.S. this season.

The video of Cohen’s mad dash naturally took social media by storm, but for those who’d seen him run before, it wasn’t a shock. Greg Green, coach of the track program at Lower Moreland since 2017, is one of those people. Green recalls multiple times when his 4x400-meter relay team was well off the pace heading into the final leg, before Cohen took the baton and anchored it to victory. He did it at the Penn Relays and again at nationals, according to Green.

“As far as the athletic ability, he has this knack to just be able to go,” Green said. “That’s a special athlete.”

Steve Cohen noticed the same thing in his son.

“Over his career, he always kind of liked to lay back and then just kick it at the end,” the elder Cohen said. “So it was something I was very used to.”

The late kick may have been part of Cohen’s race strategy, but the 700 meters before that did not fall the way he wanted.

“The plan was definitely to be closer in the pack. … I did not execute the way I wanted it to be,” Cohen said. “But obviously, when there was like 150 meters left, me being in the back still, I kind of knew I had to go for it and just put on a big kick.”

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Here’s what is perhaps even more surprising: Cohen’s rise to national stardom is perhaps harder to comprehend than his finish to the race. He didn’t even want to run in college.

At Lower Moreland, Cohen ran track and cross-country and also played basketball. Cohen aligned with his father and basketball quickly emerged as his favorite of the bunch. It helped that he was good at it.

Cohen scored more than 1,000 points at Lower Moreland, winning the Bicentennial Athletic League Independence Division MVP and leading the school to a league title in 2019. He scored a career-high 30 points in the championship game.

That talent earned Cohen interest from a few local Division III schools, and Green says his efforts on the track garnered a Division I scholarship offer from Rider. Cohen turned down both, choosing to give up college athletics entirely and attend the University of Tampa.

“It just kind of ended up coming down to falling in love with the campus at Tampa and … picking that school,” Cohen said.

His father, a self-described “basketball guy,” wasn’t the biggest fan of that decision.

“I was … disappointed because I’m like, ‘Oh, man, now he’s moving out of the state and I’m not going to see him play basketball anymore,’” Steve Cohen said.

Once in college, Shane quickly realized how much he missed the daily dose of team sports he’d been getting in high school. He looked into walking on to Tampa’s Division II basketball team to satisfy his hunger but decided against it. Then, he met Tampa track and field athlete Gabe Chisari in a class they shared.

Chisari noticed Cohen was wearing a high school track backpack and swiftly asked him if he ran. Cohen said yes, and Chisari was taken aback when he heard Cohen’s race times.

“You’re faster than me,” Cohen recalled Chisari saying. “You should join the team.”

Cohen was hesitant, not wanting to restart in a sport he’d already given up. But he and Chisari became better friends as the semester went on, and eventually, Chisari persuaded Cohen to get his cleats back out and walk on to the track team.

“The rest was history,” Cohen said.

After he made the team, the COVID-19 pandemic swept away most of Cohen’s freshman season on the track. The shortened campaign was disappointing, but the pandemic inspired him to put more effort into running than he ever had before.

“That entire year was just me running, putting the mileage together,” Cohen said. “I came back in the spring of my sophomore year and that’s when things really came together for me on the outdoor track.”

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With a recharged motor, Cohen turned an 800-meter time of 1:56.40 as a freshman into 1:49.19 as a sophomore in 2021, and then 1:48.25 as a junior in 2022. He placed in the top 10 at the NCAA Division II championships both years, taking momentum into his senior season.

But he suffered a femoral stress fracture in his leg as the year got underway, and his times slowed. What was once 1:48.25 became an inability to flirt with anything below 1:53, and even that felt like he had reached his ceiling.

“He never really got back the form,” Steve Cohen said. “We just figured he would graduate from Tampa and move on to his next journey.”

Cohen’s injury dampened the interest he had from Division I schools, but Virginia’s coaching staff — led by director of track and field and cross-country Vin Lananna — took a chance on him when Cohen made contact through the transfer portal. The Cavaliers offered Cohen a scholarship and brought him to Charlottesville for a visit, and he was sold.

“I ended up only doing my official visit here and I fell in love, and that’s when I knew I was going to commit,” Cohen said.

At Virginia, Cohen’s trajectory took off. He set a new personal best of 1:47.54 in the 800 meters at the Virginia Challenge in April and lowered that mark three more times on his way to qualifying for the NCAA championships.

Cohen clocked 1:46.94 in the preliminaries to qualify for the final, where he announced himself to the track and field world in stunning fashion. He hasn’t yet managed to wrap his head around it.

“I still can’t really believe it,” Cohen said. “Being at a Division I school, let alone a national champion — I just remember watching these guys on YouTube.”

With the blistering new personal best Cohen holds, he has qualified for the 800 at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene beginning June 27.

Cohen, who is training in Bend, Ore., with four other Virginia athletes as the trials approach, has his sights set even higher now that a national title is under his belt.

“I’ll get back to the basics and hopefully can make it to the final on Sunday,” Cohen said. “Maybe book my ticket to Paris.”

Not bad for a basketball player.