A potential for greatness – CWSS Onasha Rogers
Onasha Rogers
Onasha Rogers

 

SEVENTEEN-year-old Onasha Rogers professed to have always had a love for running, but it was only a few years ago that she really started to get into it.
“Growing up I always loved running; it’s in my blood from my grandfather straight down to my mom and the rest of my family,” Rogers remarked.
But it was over the last three years she’s been on a steady line of development that peaked in her 2017 season; more specifically with her winning a silver and a relay bronze at the South American Junior Championships (SAJC) earlier this month.
But medalling wasn’t her only achievement at the Junior Championships.
The youth athlete ran the fastest she’s ever done in her entire life, clocking a personal best of 11.71 seconds in the Girls’ 100m, which was what landed her the silver medal at SAJC.
Her personal best of 24.48 seconds in the 200m was achieved just one week prior, at the Independence meet in May. For the 100m silver she finished behind Brazil’s fastest female junior Lorraine Martins, and just behind compatriot Kenisha Phillips.
Since the season started, Roger has been giving Phillips some keen rivalry on the track.
With Phillips going unrivalled since she began to gain fame as Guyana’s leading junior female over the past few years, Rogers has begun to raise a few eyebrows.
This season was also the year that Rogers made her debut as a national athlete, representing Guyana at the CARIFTA Games. Ending with 12.18 seconds in the 100m and 25.14 seconds in the 200m says that the Mackenzie High School student still has some way to go with her development.
But her coach Moses Pantlitz believes in her potential – a potential that he says he’s seen in her since the day she first joined the Christianburg/Wismar Secondary School (CWSS) athletics club – the same club that produced CARIFTA junior Boys’ 100m gold medallist, Compton Caesar.
“Looking at her age, she had great potential with the right training. (At the beginning) it progressed not the way we were looking for, because at that age they wouldn’t normally come out and train as regularly as you would hope. Sometimes she would just come out two times a week. But I saw the potential in her. It was over the last few years she’s showing a lot of progress.”
Rogers has been with CWSS club since 2011, after deciding to do some more training to develop her performance at Nationals, representing Upper Demerara/Kwakwani. She first began representing the District as an Under-10 athlete in 2009, when she ran and won the 100m and 200m races.
In 2010 she claimed another gold in the 100m and silver in the 200m. In 2012 she set her first record – 12.40 seconds in the Girls’ Under-14 100m, a record which still stands today.
Two years later she set the Girls’ Under-16 100m record at 12.2 seconds, but that was later erased by Kenisha Phillips’ 12 seconds in 2015.
It was her consistent performance that drove Rogers to committing even more to her potential in athletics.
“After I made Nationals the first year they realised my potential and began pushing me to the next level where I entered a club and started training.
When I was 12 years old I travelled to Barbados for a Relay Fair where the exposure taught me a lot more about athletics and that’s where I began to take athletics even more seriously,” she recalled.

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