Yohanes van Meerten barely takes a pause when asked about his birth story. The Flagstaff High School running sensation knows he was left as an infant near a building in Ethiopia, but the details aren’t that important. What matters is the here and now, putting one foot in front of the other.
“I read the police report, it was like, I think it was behind a mall or something, and the police found me,” said van Meerten, the Eagles’ senior cross country runner who is ranked third in the nation and prompting surreal scenes whenever he races.
“They ended up taking me to adoption senate,” van Meerten said. “I was there for eight or nine months. My parents were there, and they adopted me, and I moved to the United States when I was a year old.”
Van Meerten’s story is not an unusual one in Ethiopia. A 2025 UNICEF report estimates that the country has more than four million orphans and abandoned children under the age of 18, more than 4% of the population due to a combination of drought, HIV, poverty and regional conflicts.
At the time, Sara Clancey and Brian van Meerten, the parents of van Meerten, were in the Peace Corps and based in Lesotho in South Africa. During their stay, they were essential in helping with the HIV outbreak, aiding locals with medical care and resources.
“It was a wonderful time,” Clancey said. “We got to see some really beautiful places and meet really wonderful people, an amazing experience.”
Now, in the midst of what he hopes will be an historic season, van Meerten has already committed to run for the famed University of Oregon program next year. He is one of the few high school runners who has an NIL deal, an Olympic hopeful who is often bombarded at races by fans hoping to meet him.
It’s a charisma that was evident at a young age, said Clancey, describing her son as a natural-born leader.
“He was a wedding coach for some pretend weddings the kids were role-playing,” Clancey said. “There’s a little 3-year-old kind of hobbling around and trying to lead everyone and tell them where to go and how to do things and it was really cute. He always had a leadership mentality.”
Originally into basketball when he started high school, van Meerten would go to a nearby park from sun up to sun down, to the point where if kids didn’t see him that day, they would be worried that something was wrong and ask if he was OK.
“He’s actually a really good shot, 3-pointers and layups,” Brian van Meerten said. “So the practice paid off.”
But once van Meerten discovered he was a better runner than a basketball player, he started to take cross country more seriously, especially when he realized he had a strong future in the sport.
At his most recent event, the Desert Twilight in Mesa featuring runners competing from multiple states, van Meerten struggled, finishing fourth while suffering through a bout of food poisoning. Next up for van Meerten is the prestigious 78th annual Mt. SAC Cross Country Invitational in Walnut, California on Oct. 24, where many of the nation’s premier high school runners will converge and the event will celebrate its one millionth contestant. As a junior, van Meerten finished first and broke the Mt. SAC hill-filled three-mile course record, clocking 14:10.1.
Despite his lackluster performance at the Desert Twilight in late September, where he vomited the last few feet of the race, runners of all ages kept approaching the Flagstaff tent, hoping to get Van Meerten’s autograph or to take a picture with him, not letting it get to his head. It was a surreal scene, uncommon in the world of cross country.
“I would say that really hasn’t changed him. He is really good at keeping that kind of stuff out of his personal life,” Flagstaff teammate and friend Qalo Weimer said. “He knows he’s fast, but I’d say he’s quite humble as a person, at least personally with me. He kind of tries to avoid that kind of stuff, which is really funny to see.”
Brian van Meerten and Clancey both expressed pride in their son for his ability to handle the pressure and the spotlight.
“He always has a smile on his face after the races,” Clancey said. “He’s really friendly with all the other kids. I don’t think Brian [van Meerten] or I have ever been under the spotlight like he has, and I just feel like he’s dealing with it in a very admirable way.”
Looking forward, not back
In early September, as the cross country season was barely underway, van Meerten sat in a shaded area near the Peoria course he had just dominated, winning the NoPo Invitational in a breezy time of 14:43, and talked about his childhood.
“It just had a really good adoption program for Ethiopia,” van Meerten said. “Since I know so many of my friends are from there, too, being adopted, it’s just so much easier.”
After leaving East Africa, his parents originally explored moving to a variety of places such as Denver and North Carolina, but eventually settled on living in Flagstaff. He has never returned to Ethiopia, but has taken a trip to South Africa, which he thought was cool.
“It sometimes crosses my mind to go back to Ethiopia,” van Meerten said. “It is just like, I like the U.S. so much here that I don’t want to leave it.”
For the moment, as his final high school season settles into a rhythm, he is focused on one breath, one step, one race at a time, hoping to peak at the Arizona state meet Nov. 14 at Cave Creek Golf Course.
“I settle in the last two miles,” van Meerten said. “If there’s no one around me, some people might call it cocky, but I kind of jog it in just because I don’t want to push myself any harder right now because it is only September, and we’ll be going for another few months.”
Weimer said van Meerten is a different, yet similar person between his races and off the course, reserving his joking nature to focus on the race at hand and gain a competitive edge.
“He’s kind of like two different people,” Weimer said. “When he’s running, he’s an athlete, he is still kind of funny, he goofs off, but outside of that, he’s a lot more chill and less competitive outside of the sport.”
For van Meerten, choosing the right college went beyond finding the best running program. He also considered the scholarship opportunities that come along with his high ranking, along with finding the path to pursue his dream job and the university that would benefit him the most in that journey.
“My main thing is to pay for college, because you know, college is so expensive,” van Meerten said. “I didn’t have the money to go to college. If I didn’t have this scholarship, I probably wouldn’t be going.”
Flagstaff boys and girls cross country coach Trina Painter said that, from her perspective, van Meerten’s recruiting process was equally exciting and overwhelming for him. With reporters and universities taking interest in his future, he found himself balancing a world of attention and expectations. He had to manage his time and energy which proved to be a challenge.
“I think he was a little tired from all of the travel, but he handled the whole thing pretty well,” Painter said. “Deciding early has allowed him to put more energy and focus into his senior season and training, instead of the recruiting process he went through his junior year.”
Ezra Varley, a senior runner for Flagstaff, said van Meerten has helped him in his own recruiting process, as Varley hopes to continue competing after high school.
“Since he signed onto Oregon, he knows that I’m in search of a college to run for,” Varley said. “He has reached out to me a lot in trying to help me in the recruiting process, and that means a lot to me.”
Brian van Meerten shared a similar sentiment, noting how his son puts the people who support him first, and prioritizes the people who ask him for advice. At a meet in Boston, Brian was struck by an interaction he had with a group of runners from another state.
“They were like, ‘Who are you rooting for?’ and I was like ‘Yohanes,’” Brian van Meerten said. “They went ‘We are, too,’ and it was just cool to see his support system he has and the other kids that look up to him, so I’m proud of him for that.”
As one of the nation’s most sought-after distance recruits, van Meerten fielded attention from an array of universities, including UCLA, Duke, BYU, Florida, Washington, Northern Arizona, Notre Dame, Stanford, Georgia and Syracuse. He chose Oregon not just for its renowned track program and facilities but also because it’s the ideal place to earn a degree in business marketing.
“A big thing was my education,” van Meerten said. “I’ve always wanted to go into business marketing. That’s been my dream job for a while. I was looking at the big picture. Oregon is a great learning school, too. I knew I would have resources and opportunities to pursue my job in business marketing, so that’s the main reason I picked there.”
Last year, when van Meerten was in the midst of a sensational season as a junior, he became the first Arizona cross country athlete to ink an NIL deal while still in high school. He signed with On, a Swiss athletic footwear and apparel company that is the third most valuable publicly traded footwear brand in the world, behind Nike and Adidas.
That junior season was memorable for many reasons.
Besides winning the AIA Division II individual state title where he broke the course record and set a personal best of 14:25.7 for 5,000 meters (second all-time in Arizona), van Meerten finished second at the Nike Cross Nationals, which is essentially the country’s high school national championship. It was the best-ever race from an Arizona runner, setting the stage for what he hopes will be an even better senior season.
In his coach’s eyes, van Meerten has the mentality, along with immense natural talent, that allows for unlimited potential, but Painter doesn’t want to put unnecessary expectations on what he can achieve.
As coach of Flagstaff’s boys and girls teams since 2003, she has guided the Eagles to 21 state titles and 14 individual champions, and now has an up-close look at van Meerten’s considerable abilities.
“Yohanes has an internal switch that when it turns on he is unstoppable, especially when combined with his natural talent,” Painter said. “He turns into a distance running machine. He has so much potential still inside of him. It’s exciting for me as his coach to think ‘How fast will he run over these next 10-15 years?’
“I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. It’s hard to project what he will accomplish without putting unnecessary pressures or expectations on him but I think he’ll be a fun one to watch as he continues to develop.”
As van Meerten’s parents reflect on the infant they adopted in Ethiopia, they also are hesitant to predict the future for their son. Whatever he is doing and no matter where he goes, they just want him to be content.
“We know he’s a hard worker,” Clancey said. “He has the talent and good relationships with others connections, and we will just kind of see where that leads him. We’re not able to predict, but we just want him to be happy wherever it is and whatever he’s doing.”
