A conversation with Tyree Adams can quickly go off the tracks for the simple reason that the Rider University track and field standout will have the other person laughing so hard that they forget what is being discussed.
Sometimes he’s not even trying to be funny. He just is.
Take, for example, the Bronc senior’s philosophy on setting personal goals.
“I set one my freshman year when I came in,” Adams said. “My goal was to (long) jump 23 feet and I jumped 23 the first meet. I wanted to set a goal to go after during the whole year, and I just did it for the first meet! I was like, ‘This goal thing doesn’t work out for me, so no more goals.’ It just restricts you. I’m just gonna go out there and try my best every time.”
And then there is the story of how he became a long jumper who eventually became good enough to win the MAAC Indoor Championship last year. It seems former Hamilton High West teammate Darryl Hardee had something to do with that.
“I didn’t want to be good at long jump in high school,” Adams said. “I got good at it because I couldn’t beat Darryl in triple jump. When I first started that was his thing, he wanted to beat (Jayson) Dimanche’s record in triple and I said, ‘All right, I’m gonna beat him before you.’ After a while I figured out, ‘Well, this is not gonna work out, let me start working on long jump because I’m not gonna get you in that.’ So that’s really how I became decent at long jump.”
Of course, when he got to Rider he knew he was awesome—for about 10 minutes.
“It’s funny because I felt like we were good in high school and then I came to college and found that we weren’t good,” Adams said. “I was like ‘Oh, wait. This is a whole new world.’”
He also discovered that being good at long jump has less to do with jumping than he thought.
“I needed to learn how to run,” Adams said, still laughing at the memory. “It’s funny because I didn’t know how bad I ran until I came to college. Our first day of practice is the first day of school, and our coach says, ‘We’re not jumping until November.’ And I was like, ‘Why are we here? I thought that’s what we do, jump? This makes no sense to me.’ In my head I’m like, ‘Who don’t know how to run? Isn’t that like, a simple thing?’
“Then I quickly learned I run like crap, and my coach always reminds me of that. He told me at first, ‘You have terrible running form, if I graded you, you’d have an F.’ I was like ‘Oh.’”
And then there were his classroom misadventures, of which there are few since Adams carries a 3.2 grade point average.
“And if I didn’t have to take Spanish it would have been higher,” he said. “But you gotta take two semesters of language. My first I got a B, but in Spanish II, I had this teacher, she was just hard. My girlfriend is Spanish, and she helped me study, and she’s like, “Your teacher is hard!’ Every other class that semester I had a A, A-minus or B-plus. Without Spanish I would have had a 3.7 but it went to 3.1 because I got a D. The only thing I could say in Spanish is ‘¿Como se dice?’ (how do you say?). I would say that for every word, and the teacher would never call on me anymore because she would just get annoyed.”
To hear Adams actually tell these stories is even funnier, but life is certainly no joke to him. He is all business when it comes to the classroom and the jumping pits, but with a good-natured approach.
“He’s always happy, always excited,” Rider coach Bob Hamer said. “He’s a fun kid, he’s doing really well academically. It’s always good to see a local kid come in here and take advantage of all the opportunities he’s given athletically, academically. I think he’s really enjoying his opportunities, hopefully when he graduates he takes all these experiences and does something wonderful with them.”
At Hamilton West, Adams was part of an outstanding three-man jumping crew (with Hardee and Malik Snead) whose abilities to take flight were so impressive they were dubbed “Hamilton Airlines.” Adams was long jump champion in both the Central Jersey Group III sectionals and Mercer County meet, and the Airlines helped West to a county title. Hardee is now a rap artist, while Snead is having great success at the University of Connecticut.
Adams earned a scholarship to Rider, where he experienced indoor competition for the first time after playing basketball for West. When first jumping inside, Adams felt adjusting to the smaller space was the biggest difference.
“The tracks are obviously smaller;” he said. “The runway is a little different. It’s actually better because outdoors you gotta deal with weather. It rains, it’s windy, it’s cold. Indoors, you do warm-ups, it’s gonna be warm, and there’s no other problems. You only have to be prepared and hope everything goes well.”
In fact, Adams has become a lover of the Great Indoors.
“Now outdoors is my problem,” he said. “I do great in indoors and I go to outdoor meets and I’m like, ‘Who is that person?’”
His indoor career did not start well, as Adams pulled a hamstring the second week of practice and jumped in just two meets that winter. He competed the entire outdoor season but said, ‘It wasn’t anything good.”
Adams showed his potential as a sophomore, winning a long jump silver medal in the MAAC Indoor Championships while taking first in the Princeton New Year’s Invitational and at Rutgers. He was a two-time MAAC Performer of the Week for the indoor season.
“I guess I don’t pay attention,” he said. “I didn’t even know there was an award like that until I won it.”
Adams exploded last year in helping Rider win the MAAC Indoor team championship. He won the long jump in a school indoor record of 24-9.25 feet and was also a finalist in the triple and high jumps, where he took fifth and sixth, respectively. His efforts gained him Field Performer of the Meet and also pushed Rider over the top as they defeated Monmouth by three scant points.
“Ever since my freshman year, it was some kid from Manhattan I was going against,” Adams said of his long jump. “My sophomore year, we were going back and forth, on my last jump I passed him, his next jump he beat me, so I got second my sophomore year. Last year, I knew it was gonna be between me and him, I got my big jump, and he still almost beat me. I only beat him by two centimeters.”
Hamer still discusses the performance with admiration, saying, “He had a tremendous meet. Sometimes you have one of those meets where you’re just like, ‘Wow, he’s ready to jump out of the building,’ and the meet he had that day was tremendous. We always talk about solving the process. If you’re always trying to jump really far you’re not going to jump very far. I think (at the MAACs) he got caught up in the competition there. We had a chance to win the meet, the team was having a really great meet, and Tyree stepped up for the team and really put a big jump out there.”
Adams was also an indoor finalist in the IC4A long jump and won the Rutgers Invitational, Spartan Regional Invite and TCNJ dual meet. During the outdoor season, he was a finalist in all three jumps in the MAAC meet.
In Rider’s first four indoor meets this year, he has taken third in both the Princeton New Year’s Invitational and Spartan Invite.
“In general he’s been pretty consistent,” Hamer said. “One of the things we’re trying to caution him with this year is, ‘Hey, obviously we want you to jump further than the year before, that’s always the goal, but just get out there, put in the work.’ He struggled this year in his first meet back from break but when he gets his timing again he’ll get out there and get the jump he’s looking for.”
As Adams pointed out, he’s actually not looking for anything, he just wants to let himself fly and see where he lands. Aside from his indoor long jump record, which was 45th best in the nation last year, he is eighth in Rider’s all-time indoor triple jump with a 47-9 and 10th on the outdoor long jump with a 23-3-1/4. His outdoor best in triple is 46-6-1/2. He is not high on the program’s high jump list but consistently gets enough good marks to provide team points each meet.
“He’s been very valuable,” said Hamer, who thinks Adams has a shot at getting to NCAAs in the outdoor long jump this year (indoor takes just 16 competitors). He also sees another possible top-three finish in the MAAC indoor meet in a long jump competition loaded with talent.
“I don’t think he really likes practice all that much but that’s all right; not many of us do,” the coach said. “I think he really lives for the meets. He’s a big-time competitor. His best moments are when championships are on the line and that was evident at the indoor championships last year. It’s just a matter of getting him to harness all his abilities and technically get sound and get out there and replicate everything. As long as a jumper sticks to the plan of what they have to do with the technical aspects of the event, and they get caught up in the emotion of the competition, a really big time jump can happen.”
One thing that has happened over the years is that Adams finally understands why running is so important when it comes to jumping.
“In high school, we would run to the board and then jump,” he said. “You’re supposed to take that momentum down the runway and propel yourself. It’s not about jumping, it’s about speed. Once you have that right running form and that speed, I learned you can be bad technical wise but if you’re fast and just have that right angle, you could be an Olympian.”
Adams is not setting his sights on the Olympics, however. At the moment he is looking for a big senior year in both indoor and outdoor track and then hopes to put his criminal justice degree to good use upon graduation. At the moment, he interns at the Arc of New Jersey in New Brunswick, which is an organization that provides criminal justice help for persons with disabilities.
“I don’t know exactly what I want to do yet,” he said. “But I want to get into law enforcement and do something to help people.”
If that doesn’t work out, he could always be a stand-up comedian, just by telling true stories.
Hamilton West alumnus Tyree Adams high jumps in a meet for Rider University.,
