Cedar Crest’s Kaddel Howard refuses to be hamstrung, races to third PIAA crown

The hamstring is not a single muscle but a group of three, running down the back of each of our legs. Before early April, Kaddel Howard gave little thought to that particular part of her body, and why would she? Those muscles had always done well by her, always powered her forward, always provided the assistance they were supposed to provide.

But then there was a tweak, followed by a full-on strain, and Cedar Crest’s standout sprinter spent the better part of two months thinking about hamstrings, her left one in particular. It was abundantly clear that all her hopes and dreams hung if not by a thread then by those three muscles, the longest of which is typically little more than 17 inches in length.

That proved to be just long enough. On May 24 Howard, a mere junior, won her third straight PIAA Triple-A championship in the 400 meters, despite the mid-race objections of the uncooperative hammy. No other Falcon, boy or girl, has three-peated at states in the 33 years Rob Bare has been coaching the team, and Howard admitted recently that as sweet as the first two had been, this one was just a little bit sweeter.

As she put it, “I feel like this one was really special to me, because of my hamstring.”

Yes, she had also won her third straight 400 title at the Lancaster-Lebanon League Meet on May 10. But at that point, she wasn’t in a great place, physically or mentally.

“I didn’t even think I was going to go to states,” she said. “After leagues, I was just going to call it quits, but I just pushed through, because it’s just one more meet before I have a longer break.”

She also earned her third straight district title, and in the state prelims ran a scorching 53.12. That was a school record, and not far off her personal best of 52.71, established in August 2024 at the Junior Olympics in Greensboro, North Carolina.

She went out hard in the final as well.

“I got into a flow,” she said.

At the race’s midpoint, she was prepared to kick it into another gear.

“That’s normally where I push,” she said. “I tried to do that, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’” 

The hamstring again. It wasn’t enough to stop her, but it was enough to concern her. “I just know down the home stretch I just had to fight through,” she said.

As Bare said, “She was able to gut it out. That was the goal – to get to the state final and if you have to gut one out for yourself, then you gut one out. And that’s what she did.”

She wound up running a 54.37, over a second faster than Dieruff’s Aniya Holder, who finished second in 55.86.

So, mission accomplished.

“For me to go out and get a school record during the prelims of states and come back and get a state title, even with a strained hamstring and the ups and downs of my season, I think, that was really rewarding,” Howard said.

The hamstring feels fine now. On June 8 she competed at the Brooks PR Invitational in Renton, Washington, finishing seventh among eight runners in 54.25 while representing Philadelphia’s High Level Track Club. She is undecided about participating in other meets this summer, but either way knows she can now ramp up her training, after being forced to gear back for weeks on end.

Still ahead are college visits, to Princeton and Kentucky in September, and Georgia and Florida in November. (If that sounds like an unlikely grouping of schools, understand that Howard is also an outstanding student who one day hopes to follow in her mom’s footsteps and become a nurse. Semi-related to that, she has already earned her EMT certification.)

Behind her, she can only hope, is this spring’s ordeal. It began on April 5, a Saturday, in the Bruce Dallas Invitational at Cumberland Valley High School. She was slated to run the 200 that day.

“I did warm up, but I feel like I could have warmed up for a longer period,” she said. “It was also cold on top of that, so I was just not in the mood for it.”

Still, she ran, and she was coming off the curve when the hamstring first raised a complaint.

“I was like, ‘OK, this feels weird,’” she said. “I never strained my hamstring before, and I was like, ‘OK, maybe this will go away.’ The next day, I felt like it went away.”

Bare didn’t even know there was a problem.

“She’s not a complainer,” he said. “Nobody made me aware of this.”

So he penciled her into the lineup in the 1,600 relay two days later, in a dual meet at Hempfield.

And, he said, “That’s when the more significant injury happened. If I would have known about the one at Bruce Dallas, we would have rested her. We don’t care about a dual-meet win when you’ve got a thoroughbred like Kaddel.”

The way Howard remembers it, the hammy “really just grabbed me” during her relay leg. And at the time she didn’t fully grasp the injury’s severity.

“I think I was kind of laughing about it; I don’t even remember,” she said. “I wasn’t too super worried about it, because I felt like if I just rested it was going to go away, because most of my injuries last a few weeks – anywhere from a few days to a few weeks – and then usually I’m fine. So I didn’t really expect too much of it. If I just rested, I was going to be fine.”

But what followed was weeks of rehab. She missed some dual meets – two or three, she said. She was repeatedly held out of practice. And the expectations she and Bare had for her season were altered significantly.

“The initial plan at the beginning was, we’re going after the 400 (at states), we’re going after the state record (51.55, by Bartram’s Sharon Dabney in 1977), we’re going after the 200 and we’re going after the four-by-four (relay), because we have three other pretty good four-by-four girls,” Bare said. “But this hamstring was not going to recover, and we had to rest her and rest her and rest her. I wasn’t going to stick a round peg into a square hole.”

Howard’s victory at the L-L Meet did little to assuage the coach or the competitor.

“I was really worried going into districts,” Bare said.

But he said Crest’s athletic training staff did yeoman’s work, and Howard provided the necessary grit.

“You try to hit the right buttons, you try to do the right thing for the kid,” Bare said, “and thank goodness it worked out.”

Her hopes and dreams, once hanging by little more than a thread, had been realized. The hammy held for one more trip around the track. There had been great ones before, and there will presumably be more to follow. But for Kaddel Howard, this was the sweetest one yet.