Ryan Hershner would’ve sat in his University of Georgia dorm room forever—if he could.
He was just there, alone, paralyzed by uncertainty.
This wasn’t supposed to be part of his story. But it very much was.
Earlier that morning, he thought he had a meeting with his coach, but when he went to his office, he just found a note telling him to go to the conference room. When he opened the door, his heart sank into his chest. Two of his friends sat with their heads hung on one side of the table. Across from them, the head coach of the track team, the distance runners coach, the dean of accounting and the head athletic director at the university glared back at him. He took his seat and looked around, hoping someone would tell him what was going on. Finally, his head coach broke the silence.
His coach slid a piece of paper across the table—and that was it. A year earlier, he accepted his track and field scholarship in the same conference room. But after a light-hearted prank went south, the document in front of him made it clear that this would also be where his time as a Bulldog ended, stripping him of his scholarship and derailing what seemed like a promising athletic career.
He called his dad and told him what happened—but he just hung up on him. He called his mom—but she told him to fix his own mess.
“I could just feel the disappointment of my family,” Hershner said. “I wasn’t just ashamed of what I did, but I was (also) ashamed of how it affected my family.”
Coming out of high school, his athletic resume stood out, racking up 13 varsity letters during his time on the soccer, basketball, track and cross country teams. And after setting a school record in the 1600m, he established himself as a top distance runner in the nation, drawing attention from multiple major Division I programs, ultimately committing to the University of Georgia.
Going from hometown hero to just another face in Georgia’s sea of elite athletes hit Hershner hard. Coming from Mansfield, Ohio, where it didn’t take much to stand out, he arrived in Athens, Georgia thinking his status as a highly-recruited runner meant something. That illusion shattered quickly during a pickup basketball game with some football players who lived down the hall. His teammate, future NFL star A. J. Green, told him to throw the ball near the rim, and all game long, he caught alley-oop-passes.
Near the end of his freshman year, he and his friends got the confidence to have some fun on campus. They saw students going into a lecture hall for an exam and one of his friends walked in and told them to follow his lead. They blended in with the hundreds of test-takers as they each sat down in front of a test. A few minutes after it began, he started to lose faith in his friend. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted him walking up to the front. Hershner’s heart started thumping—and that’s when he knew it was happening.
“I heard some people below murmuring when he walked up to the professor with the test in hand,” Hershner said. “He stopped to think about something for a second and then yelled out, ‘I’m not taking your test anymore! I’m done with this!’ and threw the test up in the air and stormed out. Then I stood up and said ‘If he’s not taking the test, I’m not taking it either!’ and threw my test and ran out the door.”
Their other friend did the same thing and met up with them outside. As they walked down the hallway talking about how they thought it was a flop, the double doors to the auditorium burst open.
“There was this wave of kids following us,” Hershner said. “They were all screaming ‘We’re with you guys!’ and we were like, ‘No, no, we’re not part of the class! Go back in.’ So we took off running and we had this mob of people behind us running through the city.”
That night, the pranksters laughed about it, but the next morning he would find out that the school did not share his sense of humor. At the time of the incident, it was too late in the recruiting cycle for him to get a scholarship from another school, but he was determined to continue his running career.
“I didn’t want to be another kid who got a college scholarship from Mansfield, Ohio that didn’t live up to anything,” Hershner said.
With limited options, he chose to enroll in Rend Lake College, a community college in Ina, Illinois. His distance coach at Georgia told him that if he kept good grades and ran fast times that there was a chance they’d bring him back—and he was sold. The school is a hidden junior college track and field powerhouse designed for people who were fast in high school but didn’t make good grades or ran into some problems like Hershner did. But going from an elite school to a junior college was just as big of a culture shock as going from Mansfield to Georgia.
“We went door to door, sold T-shirts and worked concessions at other events to help pay for the gas and hotel fees for our meet schedule,” Hershner said.
But the drop in funding didn’t correlate with a drop in competition. The team was incredibly talented and everyone there had a chip on their shoulder, and it showed.
“Practices and meets were really intense,” Hershner said. “We felt like we were trying to prove that we belonged or that we were better than a mistake we made.”
After working all off-season, he was disappointed when his first few races went poorly. He loved running, but he didn’t know if it was worth the sacrifice. Just last year he was surrounded by a world-renowned coaching staff and training with generational athletes. Now, if he didn’t sell enough candy bars, he wouldn’t be able to race. At one point he even considered finishing up his degree and returning home, but when he saw some of his teammates started getting recruited, their success motivated him to keep going.
Even after being forced out, he still missed Georgia and spent the year grinding for a second chance at his dream school. He thought he did what he needed to do—his grades were high and his times were faster than before, so he sent his stats over to his old distance coach at Georgia.
“He called a few days later and told me the head coach said I was recruitable but he still doesn’t want me on the team,” Hershner said. “Apparently he thought that if I came back, I might do it again and he wanted to spend their money on someone else. That was devastating to hear because I put all my eggs in one basket and it didn’t work out and so, once again, the doubt flowing through me was ridiculous—I felt like I was a failure.”
Even though he was beating himself up about Georgia, his coach at Rend Lake reminded him that this was not the end—there were other schools that wanted to bring him in for a visit. In the end, he ended up settling on Kansas State because it reminded him of his small midwestern hometown, but the transition to his third school in three years was challenging.
“The constant changes made me feel a little insecure, and by a little, I mean a lot,” Hershner said. “I felt like I was constantly trying to fit in at a place that would accept me.”
He was still searching for what he had at Georgia and that created a mental roadblock keeping him from enjoying his time there.
“My friend who went from Georgia to Clemson felt similarly during his transition and he advised me that I shouldn’t try to get Georgia out of Kansas State—I need to see Kansas State for Kansas State,” Hershner said. “Once I listened to that and did that, things got a lot easier. I started connecting with more people, like my training partner, who’s now one of my best friends.”
While sitting in his dorm room for the last time, he didn’t realize it, but he was embarking on the most challenging journey of his life. Through it all, he still says he regrets the prank, but he knows all of it happened for a reason. And at the end of the road, he managed to stay out of trouble and become the first person in his family to graduate from college. He even met his wife, lower school teacher Erica Hershner, who was a hurdler on the team.
“I’m really appreciative of my time at Georgia and my time at Rend Lake and my time at Kansas State and the people I met along the way, because without them I don’t think I would’ve developed into who I am now,” Hershner said.
And now as a coach, training the next generation of runners, he carries a little piece of each place he’s been with him. It goes beyond X’s and O’s, to truly make a difference– he believes athletes need to be surrounded by people who truly care about them.
“As an athlete, I put my identity in my results and I attached who I am with how fast I ran and I was too foolish to not see how that mindset hurt me,” Hershner said. “Asking someone directly after their race if they ran a PR automatically sets up a value system based on black and white results. The way I coach here has nothing to do with outcomes, but has everything to do with the process and the character of who the athlete is.”
