Kaylee Montgomery
Kaylee Montgomery of Batesville, Arkansas, stood at the start of the State 5A Cross Country Championships, hoping to set a PR (personal record) in the last race of her high school career, “or, at least, to give it all that I had.”
She missed the first goal but far exceeded the second by helping a competitor in distress. Nearing the finish line, Kaylee saw Julia Witherington of Greenwood crawling on the ground. Eyes on the prize, other runners sidestepped or ignored Julia, a top ten finisher the previous two years at State. But Kaylee’s goals disappeared.
“I wasn’t really thinking,” she says. “I saw her down and everyone passing her. I thought that Jesus wouldn’t pass me by. He’d pick me up.”
So Kaylee stopped and bent down, telling this rival and stranger, “’You got this.’ She couldn’t get up on her own. I didn’t know if she could speak at the time, but she put her arm around me.”
Kaylee, too, was exhausted, so she turned to prayer. “And in that moment she got up. I kept encouraging her and asking the Lord to give her strength. She went from barely walking to almost jogging. To me, that’s almost a miracle.”
“If she hadn’t stopped and picked me up,” Julia says, “I would have been crawling across the line.”
Kaylee’s father, Rob, captured video of the moment that harkens to 2012, when the Musials honored Meghan Vogel-McCormick. Seeing rival Arden McMath lying exhausted during the final lap of a state track meet, Meghan picked up Arden, who leaned on her to the finish line. Meghan’s story is among the Musials’ most memorable. It has legs, if you will.
But Kaylee had never heard of Meghan. Like Meghan, though, video of Kaylee went viral. “It’s a reminder to see that good things are happening,” Julia says, “and it’s a great way to see the spirit of the sport.”
Though the two runners live almost four hours apart, they continued to connect via Instagram and text. Local TV stations in both regions of Arkansas picked up the story, in part because Kaylee’s actions have special resonance in Greenwood. The community was mourning football player Isaiah Arrington, who died in a house fire with his mother and younger sister just a month earlier.
“That school was hit with a lot of sadness. When Julia went down, her teammates worried about her because of what happened on the football team,” says Kaylee’s mom, Amy. “It seemed like they were hungry for some good deed for their community. But before we knew it, we had more than 1 million shares. I guess people everywhere are just hungry for good deeds.”
After the story gained national attention, Kaylee received scholarship offers from several universities. She turned them down to remain close to home, pursuing a degree in medical sonography. Her kindness, however, has extended as far as Uganda, where she joined a humanitarian aid mission over the summer.
Kaylee still runs − now seeking goals beyond a PR. She entered a half-marathon to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital because of the care that her cousin received there for brain cancer. So perhaps the aid she offered Julia was a precursor of bigger steps ahead.
“Something like that was so little,” Kaylee says, “but God let me glorify him through this action. Because of the amazing things He has done for me, I want to do my best to show others.”