Chad Zallow enters final postseason as program’s greatest

May 3, 2019 at 12:00a.m.

Entering his final postseason for YSU’s track team, Chad Zallow is the program’s most decorated athlete

Chad Zallow will try to deliver a championship for his hometown in his hometown for a final time.

Today’s Horizon League Outdoor Championships represent the start of Zallow’s last postseason run for Youngstown State’s track and field program. Regardless of how it goes, his legacy with the Penguins is unmatched.

“Coming in here, I have pretty lofty goals I wanted to achieve and I wanted to win championships for my team and represent YSU,” Zallow said. “I did what I wanted to do. I’m very satisfied with how things went and I just can’t believe how fast it went by.”

Track and field is a sport that’s based on numbers and those tell just exactly how fast the senior hurdler from Warren JFK High School has gone during his YSU tenure.

His status as a six and soon to be seven-time All-American, a four-time Horizon League champion and his ownership of multiple school, meet and venue records easily make him the greatest track athlete to wear the Penguin colors.

Track coach Brian Gorby agrees with that assessment and is willing to take it a step further: he’s the greatest athlete in YSU’s history regardless of sport.

“We’ve had All-Americans in [FCS] football, but if you place Chad in the world of football, he’d be going after the Heisman trophy,” Gorby said. “You have to know based off the results that he’s the greatest athlete of all time as far as YSU athletics are concerned. I can’t think of anyone else.

“He’s third in the nation at what he does and he’s been doing this since he was a freshman.”

For athletic director Ron Strollo, that stance isn’t that outlandish.

“Everyone has an opinion on who the greatest of all time is, but he sure is there for me,” Strollo said. “In all of our sports, it’s hard for me to think of someone in my time around in this athletic department as a student-athlete and an administrator that has competed year in and year out on a national level — not only with collegiate runners, but elite runners around the world — and he’s represented us so well.”

As far as what Zallow thinks of the G.O.A.T. moniker, that’s someone else’s case to make.

“I’m not someone who calls himself the greatest of all time. It’s something other people can say about me,” Zallow said. “I feel like I’ve put myself in that conversation and that’s there for people to debate, but I won’t put that on myself.

“It’s a huge honor just to be considered that.”

While there’s plenty of conference accolades and he’s placed high in national competitions — he beat Olympic qualifer Johnathan Cabral in the 60-meter hurdles in February during the Millrose Games — the one achievement that eludes him is an NCAA title, where the highest he’s gone is third.

“Obviously, it’s every athlete’s goal to achieve that, but there’s some really great athletes within the NCAA.

“I’m definitely satisfied with how I did and I have another opportunity to go after that,” Zallow said. “I can also look back at my career and say I did my very best and represented YSU to the best of my ability, so I’m definitely satisfied with how things went.”

A lot of possibilities are open to Zallow once his days as a Penguin are done. He can turn pro in track and pull together money through a network of sponsorships, prize money and other fees.

He also participated in the football team’s pro day in March and ran an unofficial 4.25-second 40-yard dash — something an NFL or CFL team could be interested in.

Zallow said he has received professional offers, but NCAA rules prevent him from responding to them. He declined to discuss where those offers came from.

One opportunity he can discuss is that USA Track & Field has reached out to him about a spot on the team for the 2019 Pan American Games in Peru, which start July 26. It’s an amateur competition that occurs every four years and run on the year before the Olympics.

“I’m in the pool of candidates and as long as I’m running fast times consistently, I have a great chance at making Team USA,” Zallow said. “It would be a huge blessing for me.”

Whatever he decides to do, he intends to stay in the Mahoning Valley and keep training in the Watson and Tressel Training Site. His reasoning for staying is the same as when he turned down offers from the likes of Penn State and Ohio State when it came time to pick a school.

“I had big-time offers. I could have gone far away and went to bigger schools. But I wanted to stay here because I wanted to represent my area,” Zallow said. “I have a lot of great support around here and it’s somewhere I don’t want to leave.”