By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE –– Not only is Owayne Owens one of the ACC’s top triple-jumpers, he’s an ambitious student who’s applying to a master’s program in the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.
Owens, who’s in his third year at UVA, asked assistant coach Mario Wilson to write his letter of recommendation. Wilson, who works with the Cavaliers’ jumpers and decathletes, was happy to help.
“I almost wrote too much, I think,” Wilson said, laughing. “I couldn’t stop writing about him.”
Wilson has been coaching at UVA for nearly nine years, during which time NCAA champions Filip Mihaljevic and Jordan Scott, among other student-athletes, have had a profound impact on the program. Owens has not accomplished what Mihaljevic and Scott did athletically at UVA, but “right now he is the bona fide leader of our team, and it’s much greater than his performance,” Wilson said.
“His performance is just the cherry on top. He’s been a part of our leadership group, which is basically our captains, from the beginning, and he’s very engaged. Everybody loves him. There is not a person on the team––male, female, distance, throws––that doesn’t know who he is or appreciate him. He’s smiling, always happy, and he just really appreciates everything about being here.”
Owens is from Montego Bay, Jamaica, where he shared a house with his parents, his four sisters and a brother. Wilson has roots in that Caribbean nation, too. When complications arose with Owens’ student visa as he prepared to leave for the United States in July 2018, Wilson had to fly to Jamaica to help him resolve the issue. Finally, after an arduous trip from Finland, where he competed in the World Junior Championships, Owens arrived on Grounds about nine hours before the start of his first summer school class.
Two years ahead of him at the University was Scott, who’s from Portmore, Jamaica, about 100 miles from Montego Bay on the other side of the island. When he’d enrolled at UVA, Scott was the only student-athlete from Jamaica in the track & field program, and he wanted to make Owens’ transition to life in the U.S. easier than his had been.
“There were people who helped me,” Scott recalled, “but I feel like having somebody who was from Jamaica who had already dealt with the culture shock, the difference in culture, going about day-to-day situations, would have been helpful.
“I was able to be that for Owayne. We bonded as a result of that, and that bond grew into a friendship that honestly will last a lifetime.”
At the ACC indoor track & field championships last February, Scott placed first in the triple jump and Owens was second. A couple of weeks later, on the eve of the NCAA indoor championships, where Scott was to have defended the title he won in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down college sports.
At the end of the 2019-20 school year, after graduating from UVA, Scott transferred to the University of Southern California, where he’s preparing for his final season of outdoor track & field. But even though 2,500 miles separate Scott and Owens, they remain close.
“If any little thing happens, I still text him to say, ‘What are your thoughts on this,’ or ‘What you think about this?’ ” Owens said. “We send each other jumping videos and we talk about things that we can work on. So he’s still pretty much here.”
At UVA, Scott took his schoolwork as seriously as his jumping, setting an example Owens has followed. “To see how he balances both, I definitely admired that, and I try to adopt that as well,” said Owens, who’s twice been named to the ACC’s academic honor roll.
Wilson said Owens is “very prideful, and he’s just big on making the most of an opportunity and not letting people down who are in support of him.”
Owens, who carries a major in sociology and a minor in social entrepreneurship, hopes to start the two-year Batten School master’s program in 2021-22.
Batten’s J-term offerings this month included a course Owens took titled Corporate Social Responsibility: Reimagining Business as Usual. It heightened Owens’ interest in the Batten School, through which he’s been involved as one of the student-athletes in its Leadership Academy.
“Being part of [Batten] and seeing how it operates, I’m like, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to help. I want to make change,’ ” Owens said. “I’ve always had this passion to help people, and not just within my small community but globally. I’m studying sociology, and the more I know about the American society and the areas to be improved, the more I want to help. If I can study the policy, study the principles, and learn how to navigate them and learn how to adjust them to benefit the greater society, then that’s definitely a plus for me.”