Student-Athlete Of The Month: Evan Whitford

When Evan Whitford was cut from soccer tryouts at Broadneck in his freshman year, it was jarring, but not a complete surprise.

He had seen the writing on the wall, having had the same experience at club tryouts a few months before. What he didn’t see, though, was that all of it was actually a redirection into something else.

“I started looking at backup plans, and I looked at cross country, but I only had a couple of days before I wouldn’t be able to join the team because the roster was final,” Whitford said. “I emailed (then-coach Akeem) Forde and asked if I could do a late tryout. I was running for tryouts while everyone else was getting ready, and before long I was on the bus going to my first scrimmage meet. I’m thankful they let me do the late tryout.”

So is Broadneck.

Whitford showed promise almost immediately, and three years later he is a captain of the cross-country team and a distance specialist on the track team, where he won the 2025 indoor 3,200 region championship.

That included a monster final 300 meters where he outkicked the field and set a new personal record by more than 10 seconds.

“I was just hoping to qualify for states that day; I never dreamed about winning the event. You know when you’re having a good day or a bad day, and I knew it was a good day for me, but I had no idea about the time,” Whitford said. “At about two laps (400 meters left) we started to kick and we passed the guy who had been leading, and that’s when I started to think I could maybe win it. To win a region championship in an individual sport like that is amazing.”

Though the placements have varied since, in both sports, the marks are continuing to get faster. In Broadneck’s most recent cross-country meet, a 3-mile course, he cracked 16 minutes for the first time, a signal that he is ready to tackle his senior year.

When he’s not stacking AP classes and running laps, Whitford serves as the president of Broadneck’s National Honor Society (NHS) chapter, after holding an officer position last year. He liaises with community organizations and events to see how Broadneck NHS members can get involved with service time and other ventures.

Currently he is taking two AP classes and a calculus class at Anne Arundel Community College, a lighter load than last year’s stacked schedule but still challenging enough to keep him on his toes. While he used to be more interested in computers and building, he has shifted his college focus to either mechanical or aerospace engineering.

“I found out that I really like the math side of engineering more than the coding side, and that’s where a lot of mechanical engineering ends up is with the math side,” he said. “I also really enjoyed taking my physics classes, which are more (math-based).”

He also spends summers working on, or being on, his family boat — something he took all summer to fix this time around — and volunteering with the Cape Track summer program, where he helps middle school distance runners hone their technique.

“They run up to a mile at Cape. It’s just a great opportunity for me to help the middle schoolers out with some of the things that I’ve learned about running that can also help them get better,” Whitford said.