Sarah Cowley Ross for LockerRoom
Some of Briana Stephenson’s hardest days as an athlete led her to make one of her boldest decisions – switching events from long jump to the heptathlon.
After major knee surgery in January 2022 and facing a long rehabilitation, Stephenson took the encouragement of her coach and moved away from a single-event focus into the seven-event discipline.
It seems like a counter-intuitive move, but the heptathlon provided an opportunity for Stephenson to disperse the training load across her body by doing the seven events – 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m, long jump, javelin and 800m.
“I actually intended to go into heptathlon when I left school but it didn’t align with what my coach at the time had planned for me,” she says.
What began as a rehab experiment has become life-changing. Stephenson has climbed rapidly through the ranks and recently achieved the Commonwealth Games A performance standard, scoring 6098 points – breaking the magical 6000-point barrier at the Queensland Championships in Brisbane.
Every track and field event has milestone barriers and for Stephenson, crossing 6000 points for the first time in January was a “big feeling”.
She says she knew what she had to run, going into the 800 metres, the last event, “so I was really confident I could do it because it felt so close many times”.
But Brisbane almost didn’t happen as Stephenson struggled with a grumpy Achilles tendon at the end of last year.
Five weeks out from the Queensland champs, Stephenson told her coach Matt Wyatt she’d be content going to Brisbane simply to cheer on the rest of her training squad, instead of competing.
“But Matt told me we have time and then we just threw the kitchen sink at it and managed to get there,” she says.
No stranger to injury and knee surgery, Stephenson ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) playing netball in her final year at Napier Girls’ High School.
She was riding a high – making the New Zealand Secondary School netball team and selected for the Oceania athletics champs.
“I was doing a lot, and you think you can manage – but I broke,” Stephenson recalls.
The dual national representative was playing for one of her four netball teams when she took a ball on the run and landed badly, needing to be carried off the court.
At the time, Stephenson was living in her school hostel at Napier Girls’ High School, surrounded by friends who lifted the athlete’s morale to get her through her rehabilitation.
Returning for her final year of high school, she was determined to make the national secondary school netball team again and on the track, secure an athletics scholarship to a US college. But her ambitious plan didn’t eventuate.
“I was really disheartened when I missed the netball team and I intended to go to college in the US, but I just wasn’t quite at the level that I needed to be – so I moved to Auckland.”
Coached by her father William Stephenson throughout high school, Briana Stephenson eventually found her way to Wyatt, her former training partner and a national long jumper, as a coach, alongside completing a Bachelor in Science in Physiology.
Wyatt has been instrumental in her heptathlon shift and after the first attempt in January 2023, when she scored 5127 points, it was clear Stephenson wanted more.
“I found a new love back to the sport – I just had to learn so much every day with all the events,” Stephenson, who started athletics when she was 7, says.
Alongside Wyatt, another member of her team is sports psychologist David Galbraith, who invited Stephenson to fall in love with the day-to-day process, because the big moments are only small parts of an athlete’s career.
“I love that the heptathlon comes with so many challenges. It always feels like you can improve and that’s what keeps me motivated daily.”
That daily process as a heptathlete can be a lonely grind. Stephenson balances multiple part-time jobs alongside training, including administration work for Xpand – an online sports equipment business founded by her partner, former professional tennis player Rob Reynolds.
With the Commonwealth Games on the horizon, Stephenson’s immediate focus turned to the national track and field championships last weekend in Auckland, where she won the long jump on Saturday and successfully defended her 100m hurdles national title on Sunday.
Stephenson, the current national heptathlon champion, said ahead of the nationals that it was “a light weekend for me”. “But important as we build into the national heptathlon champs a few weeks later.”
Years after an uphill battle to return to the track, Stephenson is not only embracing training every day, but the opportunity to potentially represent New Zealand at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July.
“It would be a super-special milestone and a big deal for me and my family.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.