WHEN Chantoba Bright walks out to the long jump facility at the Randal Tyson Track Centre in Fayetteville, Arkansas, behind her will be the hundreds of people from her Linden community, Victory Valley. Bright, Guyana’s most decorated CARIFTA Games athlete, will be one of four athletes from Kansas State who will feature at the NCAA National Indoor Championships, which got on the way yesterday. In a sit-down with Kansas State University’s Creative Writing and Content Specialist, Austin Siegel, Bright spoke of her journey from Linden to ‘K-State’ and just how much of an influence the community of Victory Valley has on her life and career in Track and Field. “My community was always really supportive of me,” she said. “Where I come from, they call it the ghetto and they always say nothing good is going to come out of the ghetto. Well, when I was discovered with my talent, the people really rallied around me, supported me and pushed me to reach my full potential.”
With a runner-up finish at the Big 12 Indoor Track and Field Championships in the triple jump and a fourth-place finish in the high jump, Bright will compete against the best college athletes in the country in both events at the national meet this weekend. Her 13.60m leap at the conference meet was the fourth-best triple jump in school history – not bad for an athlete who arrived in Manhattan less than a year ago. Going back to her days in Victory Valley, Bright has never needed much time before taking flight, adding “I won the long jump the very first time I tried it.

I tried the triple jump on the same day and I won that too…I went on to nationals and broke the record. Mind you, it took my PE coach like five minutes to teach me how to long jump.” Growing up, Bright was convinced her future was on the track, where she dreamed of representing Guyana as a sprinter. She started running in elementary school and didn’t stop, even after a string of second-place finishes left Bright without an invitation to Guyana’s national meet. Another runner-up finish in high school was the tipping point. “I got second again, and I was crying because I had spent so many years trying to go to nationals,” she said. “My PE teacher took me aside and asked me if I wanted to try the long jump.” That decision would change the trajectory of Bright’s career. She was named her country’s youth athlete-of-the-year in 2016 and 2017 and became a star at the CARIFTA Games, an annual competition among the English-speaking countries of the Caribbean, winning seven medals. The CARIFTA Games was also the event where Bright first crossed paths with the coach who would be instrumental in her journey to the Flint Hills.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk to her because she wasn’t eligible (to recruit) yet, but I watched the competition and gave my card to a representative from Guyana,” K-State assistant coach Vincent Johnson said. “I told him I thought she was going to be pretty good and that she’s somebody who would look good in purple.”

Johnson is responsible for coaching the jumpers at K-State, including a contingent of Caribbean student-athletes from throughout the region. But when Bright began to consider her future at the NCAA level, the Wildcats didn’t have any scholarships available. So, the Guyanese international began her college career at UTEP. In El Paso, Bright became an All-Conference USA athlete and won her first conference championship in the long jump. After her sophomore season, Bright decided to transfer, and discovered an opportunity to reconnect with one of the first college coaches to recognise her potential at the NCAA level. Johnson’s interest had never wavered, and once he confirmed with head coach Cliff Rovelto that K-State had a scholarship available for Bright, she was packing her bags for Manhattan.
Then, the pandemic happened. “As a student-athlete, there are a lot of things that people don’t know. They see our glory, but they don’t know our story,” she said. “I’m just trying to prove the stigma wrong, that great things can come from Victory Valley.”