MYRTLE BEACH – The history maker eyed the teens at the starting line on the clay-colored track.
“It’s about moving forward. Keep your head down and get your knee up to your chest when you push off. Move forward. Go that way,” Olympian Melissa Jefferson-Wooden told a group Oct. 4 in the fourth annual Youth Track and Field Development Clinic at Doug Shaw Memorial Stadium. “A lot of races are won from the start. Get off clean and move forward.”
Jefferson-Wooden, 24, has been moving fast forward since she was a child growing up in the rural Dunbar community of Georgetown County.
She’s crossed the finish line first more times than most from racing at Carvers Bay High School and Coastal Carolina University to world championships and the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Less than a month ago, Jefferson-Wooden became the first American to win the sprint triple – 100 meter, 200 meter and 4×100 meter relay – at the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, Japan. The win also marked the second time a woman had won the triple since Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce accomplished the feat in 2013.
“It holds great weight, but it’s also just a very humbling situation for me to be in. I never, well, I won’t say I never saw myself doing the things that I’m doing … I didn’t know that it would happen the way that it did and so soon,” she said as more than 125 children lugged water bottles and spikes to the track. “I’m what you call a village kid. Everybody had a little hand in getting me to where I am. And I just want to be a part of these kids’ village.”
She wants to be the “see it and be it” inspiration just as Allyson Felix was for her. Felix competed in five consecutive Olympic games winning 11 medals, and she has 20 medals in world championship competitions. Before she was a teen, Jefferson-Wooden watched the 2012 Olympics on her family’s living room television as Felix earned three gold medals.
Jefferson-Wooden took a three-point stance showing the teens how to start a race just as a 6-year-old wandered away from the younger children gathered in the middle of the field for exercises.
“My name is Melissa, too,” the child said staring wide-eyed at the Olympian talking to the teens. “I can run. I’m not fast. I’m going to be fast. Did you see her fingernails? She’s pretty. I have a shirt like hers. I’m growing my hair out too.”
A whistle sounded in the distance snapping Melissa Williams’ attention to the rest of her group high kicking across hash marks on the football field.
“Y’all ready for a water break? Let’s take a break. I’m ready for a break,” Jefferson-Wooden yelled, noticing Williams running away as other children scrambled around the field.
Jefferson-Wooden is beginning her own break with the track and field offseason by finally going on a honeymoon with her husband Roman Wooden II about six months after their wedding.
“I’ll be just gearing up for the 2026 year and, you know, the next few years,” she smiled, looking straight to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “The Olympics at home? It’s going to, it’s going to be, like I keep saying, one for the books. I can’t wait.”
She isn’t the first to make it into sports history coming from the part of Georgetown County where two-lane roads wind by the Black River through communities named Choppee, Pleasant Hill, Gilliard, Plantersville and Browns Ferry.