NATIONAL All-schools 100m champion, Ballarat's Armani Anderson has continued her meteoric rise, named in her first Australian team for the Oceania Championships in June in Fiji.
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Anderson has been selected for the under-18s in the 100m, the first Ballarat athlete to make an Australian team in the sprint distance since her coach Gerrard Keating, who made two Commonwealth Games finals in the 1980s.
The young sprinter is one of three Ballarat athletes to be selected for the Oceania Championships, alongside world ranked 400m runner Cooper Sherman, who recently competed in his first senior team at the World Relay Championships, and high jump king Yual Reath.
Anderson earned her selection after a second placing in the National Under-18 Championships held in April in Adelaide.
She said she had seen the national titles run of 12.47 seconds as a learning experience, saying she was shocked to get a call-up to the national under-18 squad. She has previously broken the 12 second barrier.
"I was hoping I'd have a chance before the nationals, but after I ran, I didn't think I'd get selected," she said
"I saw it more as an opportunity for me to train harder, look towards the other big events coming up, aim for the next nationals.
"Hopefully this is just the start, I'm just so stoked that I could get this opportunity when I didn't think it would come up. Last season, there was absolutely no chance something like this would be an option in my mind.
"I think having all the support behind me, keeping motivated, training hard. I want to be the version of me I can become, hopefully I can continue to do that."
Keating, who has spent much of the past few years working alongside Australia's fastest women Torrie Lewis said to return to Ballarat and have such early success showed how strong the quality of athletics was in this city.
"Armani is a pure 100m sprinter, Torrie is more your 100m and 200m sprinter," he said. "The thing with Armani is she has so much time, so much potential, and all the tools that you could ever want as a 100m sprinter.
"I'm just rapt, I came back here hoping to make a bit of a difference and to see someone from Ballarat, another 100m sprinter, make an Australian team and win a national title, it's just great, I really rate this one.
"This is just so high up for me, I really rate this highly as a coach, as an athlete, because this is a Ballarat runner, she's the only one. No other Ballarat sprinter had won a national title of any kind, I'm really really chuffed."
Keating said Ballarat was in a golden age of athletics, with Sherman, Reath, javelin thrower Kathryn Mitchell and para-athlete Sam Rizzo all near the top of the rankings in this country.
"It's fantastic, I'm best mates with Paul Cleary, so I've always followed closely what's gone on here," he said. "To see how Cooper has developed, to see how Yual is now world-class and to get a front-row seat into how he and Paul work, I honestly believe Paul is the best high-jump coach in this country, he's proven that.
"Then you've got Kathryn, and Sam, then you've also got a great group of young people coming through as well, Lachie (O'Keefe) in the high jump Molly Fraser, Mackayla Culvenor and below that even younger than that. Ballarat has always had great distance runners, we've always got great walkers.
"All of those young athletes can now all look to someone like Armani and see her make a national team, they'll say 'why can't I?' as well, Ballarat is in just such a great position."
