Kindred’s Paul Olson Uses Multi-Sport Ability To Earn NDSU Track Scholarship

Olson thought about pursing basketball before this spring

KINDRED, N.D — Standing 6 foot 4 and blessed with incredible athleticism Paul Olson’s has been a crucial aspect of the Kindred Vikings recent success, taking the Class B state basketball championship and coming in second place this season. In his senior spring, Olson opted to see how his leaping ability translated to track and field.

“We’ve been working on Paul for a while,” head coach Josh Allmaras said, “His sophomore year he was going to come out and then we had COVID that year so things didn’t work out. As a junior year he had AAU basketball and golf so it got to be a little too much but he came in this fall, made it easy on us and said he wanted to do it right away so we were very excited and we knew he was going to have a tremendous amount of potential”

In his first ever meet, Olson set Kindred’s 60 meter dash record with a time of 7.19 seconds and broke the in door high jump record clearing 6 feet 8 inches.

“Its been different coming out for track for the first time then obviously performing pretty well at the first couple meets which I didn’t know what to expect going into those meets but I am pretty happy with the results so far.”

Olson’s record-setting performance at the Vikings’ meet at NDSU earned him an opportunity to realize the life-long dream of becoming a Bison when the track and field coaches offered him a scholarship.

“Its kind of always been where I wanted to go, at first I thought I was going to try to go for basketball and then when track came up it felt like the right thing to do,” Olson said. “As soon as I visited I knew that’s where I wanted to go and decided to commit.”

Wrapping up a legendary high school athletics career, Olson believes participating in multiple sports has helped him develop his athleticism and prepare him for his next challenge.

Developing different skills in different sports and then they all translate to each other, you learn one thing in basketball that can work in golf, something in golf that can translate into track, so they all kind of work together even though they seem different while you’re doing them, I think they all help each other out.”