Sister Act

Meet Brooke, Tai, and Rainn Sheppard, three athletes from Brooklyn who are excelling in their sport, spreading optimism, and thriving off the track.

- Elizabeth McGarr McCue

The day before Halloween, an unseasonably mild 70-degree Sunday, 24 girls sporting pink-and-blue track suits formed two lines at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, New York. Their lines may not have been perfectly straight — as their coach, Jean Bell, noted afterward — but the members of the Jeuness Track Club, ages five to 16, executed their plyometric drills flawlessly as they warmed up for a USA Track and Field cross-country meet.

On this day the girls were preparing to run three-person relays in their respective age groups, with each athlete covering one mile. Eleven-year-old Tai Sheppard would set up 10-year-old Rainn Sheppard to beat the second-place team in their division, also a Jeuness group, by a whopping one minute and 20 seconds. Nine-year-old Brooke Sheppard would run the middle leg of a relay and help her trio finish second in a different division.

Tai wants to qualify for the AAU Junior Olympic Games every year. She placed second in the 80-meter hurdles in her age group in Houston in July, her second time competing at the meet. “Since I qualified for my first year, I’m like, I can do this,” she says. “I know I can.”

“I plan to go to the Olympics one day in [a distance race],” says Rainn, who returned from Houston with a gold medal in the 3,000. “My track and field goals are just to keep getting emotionally and physically stronger. It’s all about what’s inside, in your mind. You have to say: You can do this, you can do this.”

“My goals are to get faster as a runner and jump higher,” says Brooke, who placed second in the high jump in Houston. “For college, I would want to stay nearby so I can see how the team’s doing.”