Kylie Gormann had her future planned out. Competitive cheerleading — basketball games, football games, all of it — was the center of her athletic life, and she fully expected it to stay that way.

Track had other ideas.

From about fifth grade, the jumping events had been pulling at her. By her junior year at Centralia High School, something shifted. Gormann entered the Illinois state long jump competition simply to compete and have fun. She landed at 18 feet, 5 inches, and walked away with a state championship.

"It was crazy," she says. "I did not think that's what was going to happen."

From that moment, the plan rewrote itself. By her senior year, she had given up cheer to focus entirely on track.

Two coaches made that journey. Reuben Hill — a CHS graduate himself, a record-breaker in his own time whose kids also competed in track for the Orphans — specialized in the jumping events and spent long hours working with Gormann mentally and physically. "He pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of," she says. And he never talked about his own accomplishments. Unless you brought it up, he never would. The other was Coach Johnson, a science teacher who, in Kylie's telling, played just as much of a role. The two coaches together built something in her that she's still drawing on.

An only child, close to her parents, Gormann wanted a college that felt right — not just athletically, but humanly. She toured Murray State in Kentucky, skeptical: small town to small town, she thought. Then she sat down with the coaching staff. "I felt like I was talking to my parents," she says. She signed.

Thanks to dual credit coursework completed at CHS, Gormann entered college already a year ahead. She graduated with her degree in nutrition and dietetics in three years. Then Murray State offered her a graduate assistant position with track and field and cross country — handling travel, recruiting visits, scheduling, nutrition, gear, social media, and team operations. Two weeks after she started, the university came back and asked her to take on a second GA role: community service initiatives, student-athlete liaison work, and event support. She said yes to both.

She always does, now.

"Centralia High School prepares you so well for college," she says, and she means the dual credit programs specifically. But she also means the daily grind of high school athletics — bouncing from sport to sport, sitting in class all day, not getting home until 7 p.m., doing it again tomorrow — that turns out to be better preparation for the real world than almost anything else.

Today, Gormann is completing her master's degree in mass communications and public relations, all online, all while working full-time at the university. She'll graduate in December — both undergraduate and graduate degrees finished in four and a half years. She's eyeing medical sales next, inspired by watching her mother build a career in the field. The competitive, relationship-driven, work-your-way-up nature of it appeals to her. "You do more, you get rewarded for more," she says. That's the environment she wants.

She's also learned something about herself along the way that didn't come easily. She is, by her own description, very Type A. Organized. Goal-oriented. Accustomed to having a plan. Learning to say yes to things before she could see where they were going — that required growth.

If she could talk to her freshman-year self, she'd keep it short: "Say yes to the plans. Chase your dream. Do it scared. Because that's how you grow."

And when the overwhelming moments come — and they do — she has a way of reframing them now. Those are the moments, she says, when she is actually growing, "creating the life that I once prayed for."