TEN-YEAR-OLD Elijah Soto-Sims is rocking back and forth on a dining chair, fidgeting, giggling with his brother, eight-year-old Malik Soto-Sims.
“Malik, stop making faces. You’re making him laugh,” his mother, Christal Sims, says. “It’s his birthday today, and they just had cake and ice cream and all the goodies,” she elaborates.
Elijah’s playing with a black rubber bracelet, bending it between his fingers, flinging it back and forth in the air.
“It’s from the Junior Olympics,” he explains.
This past July, both Soto-Sims brothers traveled to Savannah, Georgia, to compete in the 2025 USATF National Junior Olympic Track & Field Championships alongside seven other young athletes on the East Oakland Track Group, a nonprofit track and field team aimed at mentoring youth into healthy life habits.
All the team’s athletes live in East Oakland and surrounding areas. For many, track and field meets represent a unique opportunity to travel outside Oakland. For several, flying to the USATF Junior Olympics was their first time on a plane.
For the Soto-Sims brothers, though, track is nothing new. They have been on the track since infancy. Their father — Traivon Soto Johnson — serves as the EOTG head coach. He remembers bringing them in strollers to team practices and how they learned to walk by following alongside training, mimicking the motions of the athletes. The brothers were coming out of starting blocks hot at 18 months old, according to their mother.
“With (their) father being so involved with it, it just came along. They came along with the package,” she said. “It definitely takes up a lot of your weekends … But we all come together. And it’s a beautiful community that we have.”
Seventy-nine seconds
Traivon Soto Johnson grew up in Los Angeles, in what he described as “a gang-banging neighborhood.” He attended Arizona State University on a football scholarship. He’s still haunted by his last game at ASU. It was New Year’s Day, 1997. It was at the Rose Bowl. ASU had gone undefeated the whole season. They faced Ohio State University. ASU scored with one minute and 19 seconds left. OSU scored with 19 seconds left. OSU won: 20-17.
Soto Johnson’s never quite forgotten the feeling of the “back and forth,” the “battle.”
“I have this desire, this kind of emptiness of unfulfilled potential within myself that I don’t want other people to feel,” he said. “So I coach to hopefully inspire people to become the best physical versions of themselves.”
He began coaching for the EOTG in 2007, alongside EOTG founder Willie White. After White died in 2021, Soto-Johnson took over the team. Since then, the team — which prior to 2023 had only had the funds to compete within California — has traveled to Junior Olympic competitions across the U.S.
“I have this desire, this kind of emptiness of unfulfilled potential within myself that I don’t want other people to feel. So I coach to hopefully inspire people to become the best physical versions of themselves.” Traivon Soto Johnson, East Oakland Track Gems coach
In 2023, they sent five athletes to the USATF Junior Olympics in Eugene, Oregon, and four athletes to the Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympic Games in Des Moines, Iowa. That year, Soto Johnson, a physical education teacher at Castlemont High School in Oakland, fronted money he earned from a recent teachers’ raise following a strike for the team to travel and compete.
This year, to finance trips to the competitions the team started a GoFundMe. It raised $6,630. The team sent nine competitors to the USATF Junior Olympics in Savannah and two to the AAU Junior Olympics in Houston. Soto-Johnson wasn’t surprised by the team’s qualifying success.
“Once it gets to a certain point, I kind of have an idea of who’s going to qualify,” he said. “It wasn’t like a, ‘woohoo! We qualified!’ But it’s like, ‘okay, cool.’”
The heat is on
In Georgia, at the USATF competition, the air was hot and humid. In the evenings, the sky would fill with lightning and thunder. Soto Johnson recalled sitting with four of the team’s athletes in a car the first night, driving, and how they shrieked at the sound of the sky.
“The shrieks from the thunderstorms was, you know, funny,” he said. “And me telling (the team), ‘Okay. Now you’ve seen it. Now stop screaming. It’s okay.”
For the team, the heat — how oppressive it was, how blisteringly hot — remains a stand-out memory.
“It was crowded. It was hot,” EOTG athlete and East Oakland resident Michael McGee, 13, said. “It was really exciting, though. It was attention getting, attention grabbing. It made you just want to hop out of your seat and do one of the events yourself.”
McGee competed in the shot put. He qualified for Junior Olympic competitions in 2023 and 2024 but never had the funds to travel to the competitions, he said. This year was his first time flying out to compete in track and field, and his second time flying ever. The flight felt smooth, minus the effect on his ears, he said.
McGee joined the team a few years ago, after taking inspiration from his uncle, whose affection shone through in sports, specifically football and track and field.
“So I said, you know what, I’m gonna do track, and I’m gonna do football. So those are the two sports that I’m doing right now,” he said.
McGee’s uncle died in 2021. Still, McGee carried the thought of him to Georgia.
“We had a huge connection. He was never really able to see me play sports, but he always wanted to,” he said. At the competition, “I thought about him a lot, actually. It was like every single second out there. It was like, ‘do this for him.’”
McGee’s brother, Mark McGee, 12, also competed in shot put at the USATF Junior Olympics this year. He joined the team to channel his anger towards motivation, he said.
“The reason why I pushed myself forward to make it to the Junior Olympics was that I really just blacked out because there was stuff that happened at school that made me upset,” he said. “So I ended up blacking out and using that anger I had at school on the field.”
“…There was stuff that happened at school that made me upset. So I ended up blacking out and using that anger I had at school on the field.” Mark McGee, 12, EOTG athlete
Soto Johnson recognizes the potential for the team, and more broadly, for sports, to help youth work through difficulty and create healthy habits.
“The goal is to change the complexity and things going on in Oakland, you know? Start with these youth and get them involved in athletics and occupy their time to where they’re not having idle time doing other things,” he said. “The goal is that if their time is occupied with healthy lifestyle stuff, then that will alleviate them from moving into other things that won’t benefit them later on.”
What matters more than medals
The team left Georgia with no medals, but four of the nine athletes set personal records, according to Soto Johnson.
To him, the one sour spot in all the good — the record number of qualifiers on the team, the athletes learning to take on heat and lightning and humidity and thunder, the personal bests — was that no one on the team medaled. He was expecting that one medal to come from his son, Malik.
The USATF Junior Olympics awarded medals to the top eight competitors in each age bracket. Malik finished ninth in shot put.
Soto Johnson remembers watching as his son threw his last attempt, looking at the score board, realizing his son was in ninth. He remembers his son asking him, “Wait, what about the finals?” and telling him, “You didn’t make the finals.”
“I don’t think he understood. Because, again, he’s been used to (placing) one, two, three. It’s always been one, two, three, one. And it’s been a lot of ones, ones, ones, golds, golds,” he said. “It’s almost like he wasn’t even aware. Like he thought he did good enough to make it.”
Again, Soto Johnson feels that he just missed the victory. He blames the environment: the weather, the heat, the crowds. And he blames himself for not having the words to help his son overcome the environment.
“There’s the moment of disappointment that he couldn’t get there. The disappointment of not being able to overcome the obstacle of the environment,” he said. “And then, the later reflection of the disappointment in myself where I didn’t have the words to maybe get him to the point of getting out of it.”
This time, though, he sees victory in the future.
“I have that desire, you know, because it’s almost like you were so close. It’s like I almost had it. So it’s like, okay, we’re gonna get it next time,” he said.
Michael McGee, too, wishes he had pushed harder. Next time, he wants to be more disciplined, consistent.
“I feel like I did pretty good for someone who was average, so who doesn’t work to his fullest. I feel like I could have done more, and I could have pushed myself. So I’m still kind of overthinking about that right now,” he said. “I’m trying to push forward and further towards, like, beyond what I’m supposed to be doing.”
‘We knew this guy was special’
The team did win one medal at a Junior Olympic competition. It just wasn’t in Georgia. Seven-year-old Kayden Thompson placed sixth in the boys eight-and-under long jump at the AAU Junior Olympic Games in Houston, winning him recognition as an AAU All-American.
When he was just five, Thompson competed as the first leg of the EOTG’s eight-and-under relay team, traveling with the team to compete in their first ever round of Junior Olympic competitions outside California.
“So we knew this guy was special. Watching him jump, I’m like, ‘oh yeah. In two years, he’s gonna be, you know, this is gonna be his year,’” Traivon Soto Johnson said.
Thompson couldn’t train with the EOTG because he spent the summer with his father, who lives in Houston. Instead, Soto Johnson sent workouts for him to complete on his own. At the AAU Junior Olympic Games, Thompson competed in the boys eight-and-under 100 meters, boys eight-and-under 200 meters, and boys eight-and-under long jump.
For the long jump, Thompson competed in the last flight for his age division. His mother, Jocelyn Evans, remembered waiting with him in a small area, amidst hundreds of people filming, watching, photographing, and live streaming. They were both just hanging on, waiting, when his nerves got to him, she said.
“When you’re little, sometimes, you know, your nerves get to you and you don’t feel as confident,” she said. “I mean, he’s seven. He’s seven. So I knew, then. I was like, ‘Kayden. I need you to remember what your god dad taught you.’ And I said, ‘I need you to believe in you. Because I believe in you.’”
Five days earlier, Thompson had passed out while competing in the 200 meters. It was his first day at the competition. It was midday in the Texas heat. He was trying to overcome the heat on fruit and water. It wasn’t enough. Evans ran to the medical tent, she said. She remembered how the start gun kept shooting as the medical team scooped her son up.
“It felt like I overheated, and it felt like I went to sleep for a moment. It felt uncomfortable cause I never, cause I never did that in my life before,” Thompson said. “Very, very scared. But I told everybody I’m fine because I took it like a champ.”
Now, Thompson’s back in Oakland. Track season is over, but he’s eager to begin practice again.
“Some kids, they’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go,’” Evans said. “My son is on my tail. When we got back home from Houston, he was like, ‘Mom, what day is it?’ And I was like, ‘It’s Monday.’ He’s like, ‘Well, we got to go to practice.’”
Evans wants her son to slow down, take a break, enjoy childhood. She wants to remind him that he’s an athlete, but he’s also a kid. Recently, the two celebrated Thompson’s eighth birthday.
“I have a little All-American. I’ve just been in awe. I was just, I was kind of crying because it’s such an incredible moment. And I think when you’re so young, you don’t grasp it. Because, guess what? His birthday is a week later. And he’s like, ‘Mom, you know, for my birthday I just want to go to dinner (and) play video games,’” she said.
Setting new goals
Soto Johnson believes that for a team of young athletes, some of whom have never had the chance to fly on an airplane, competing at the Junior Olympics wasn’t just about winning. It was about seeing something new. It was about pillow fights and wrestling and hide-and-go seek in Airbnb, about visiting a college campus, about the local restaurant the team kept returning to. It was about exploring Tybee Island, and how the team forgot to bring sunscreen, so Soto Johnson made them hide under the shade of the umbrella every 15 minutes.
The athletes remembered the pressing heat, the humidity, the lightning and thunderstorms. The variations on English, the accents. Their ears popping on the airplane. The crowd and how it grabbed your attention, made you want to hop out of your seat and try one of the events yourself. And all of the details, the little differences: the food, the drinks, the Airbnb, how Carl’s Jr. in Oakland is rebranded as Hardee’s in Savannah.
“Some kids never have an opportunity to leave their immediate environment,” Soto Johnson said. “Flying in an airplane; living in a different home, Airbnb, or hotel; seeing the change of weather; seeing different people: just the different experience allows them a different way to grow.”
Evans, too, wants her son to enjoy not just the wins, but the journey. She wants him to remember that he’s still so young. She’s worried that if she pressures him, he’ll burn out.
“I know some parents are very hard on their kids, like, ‘What you smiling for? You didn’t do good in that.’ I hear that a lot on the field. It’s almost scary,” she said. “But I don’t want my kid to be burnt out on this. I just want him to do his best, but also remind him, ‘You’re just seven, so it’s okay.’ Because going has its own pressures. Being on the track, them shooting the gun: that has its own pressures in itself.”
But, like so many of his teammates, Kayden Thompson has bigger dreams. He’s already itching to go back to practice.
“I’m looking forward to be up with the top of the game next year, with the 9-year-olds and 10-year-olds,” he said. “I’m looking to be the fastest man alive.”