Anna Cockrell’s rise: Champions, challenges, inspiration

Anna Cockrell — one of the 25 best female athletes from Charlotte in the past 25 years — arrived at Providence Day School in 2012, knowing she wanted to run track as a sprinter.

She met the Chargers’ then-track and field coach, Carol Lawrence, and … well, this is more or less how things went from there.

Cockrell: I want to be a sprinter.

Lawrence: You’re athletic. You should try the hurdles.

Cockrell: OK, I’ll do the 100-meter hurdles. That’s like a sprint.

Lawrence: You’re athletic. You should do the 300-meter hurdles.

Cockrell: No, that’s too hard.

Lawrence: Yes, you can do it.

‘A bit hard-headed’

“I think both of us were a bit hard-headed,” Cockrell, now 28, said in an interview last week from her home near Dallas-Fort Worth.

Lawrence, who now heads the cross-country and track and field programs at Johnson C. Smith University, didn’t disagree with Cockrell’s assessment.

“Yes, we were both stubborn in her path to becoming a long hurdler,” she said.

Cockrell ended up running both hurdles events and became a state champion at Providence Day. She later won the NCAA championship in the 400-meter hurdles at the University of Southern California in June 2019 — and followed that with a silver medal in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

And Cockrell has been named one of The Observer’s top high school female athletes of the past 25 years in the Charlotte area.

She was a gymnast at Charlotte Latin while in elementary school, and in middle school, when her family moved to Michigan.

Work brought the Cockrell family back to Charlotte in 2012, and Anna Cockrell enrolled at Providence Day. By this point, she had traded in gymnastics for track and field.

“The move back to Charlotte was hard,” she said. “I’d gotten happy with the middle school I attended in Michigan.”

She said she ate lunch the first few weeks as a freshman at Providence Day with her sister Ciera, then a sophomore.

“I was a freshman, eating lunch with sophomores and juniors!” she said. “Imagine that!”

Before long, she built a circle of friends and decided in late winter 2013 to try out for track and field.

Taking on the hurdles

That’s where she met Carol Lawrence.

“At that point, I knew I wanted to run in college,” she said. “I never even thought of something like the Olympics, but I knew I wanted a collegiate career.”

She also knew she didn’t want any part of the hurdles.

“I wanted to be a sprinter,” she said.

Lawrence, however, saw something different in Cockrell. She saw the athlete.

It runs in the family. Anna’s father, Kieth, now president at Bank of America, played football in college at Columbia.

Her older brother, Russ, played football at Duke and later in the NFL with the Carolina Panthers and three other teams. And Ciera was a volleyball player who later captained the Davidson College squad.

“When Anna first came to me as a freshman, I knew she was special, because every correction I made, it stuck,” Lawrence said.

Cockrell said she didn’t realize how good she could be.

“Carol Lawrence pushed me to become who I am,” she said. “She became like a second mother to me. Don’t get me wrong — my parents have always been supportive of me. But Carol Lawrence was also like a mom.”

Lawrence said Cockrell ran the 300 hurdles in her freshman year and won in her first attempt.

“Thankfully, she decided to stick with it,” she said.

“We were also blessed to have parents like Kieth and Serena Cockrell,” she added. “They supported me in every way, no questions asked.”

Another dedicated coach

Going to USC was not on Cockrell’s radar. She thought she’d wind up at Texas or UCLA.

“I tried on the (USC) uniform, and I thought I looked ugly,” she said with a laugh.

But she enjoyed working with Trojans head coach Caryl Gilbert-Smith, so she decided to attend USC.

“By the end of my junior year, I had made my first international team,” she said. “I realized, ‘Hey, I really am good at this!’“

That was followed by runner-up finishes in the 2017 and ’18 NCAA Championships in the 400-meter hurdles — and then the first-place finish in 2019.

Later in 2019, Cockrell won silver in the 400 hurdles at the Pan-Am Games in Peru. She also won gold as a member of the 4-by-400 relay (no hurdles in that race).

But by that time, Cockrell knew something wasn’t right.

Depression isn’t …

She graduated with honors from USC and went on to earn a master’s degree. She continued as a dominating force in track and field. But something was amiss.

“I used to think that depression meant sitting around, doing nothing,” Cockrell said. “But I was getting up early, doing all the work, and being successful.”

All this time, Gilbert-Smith was watching.

One day in 2019, she told Cockrell, “You’re smiling, but it’s not reaching your eyes.”

She was referred to USC’s Sports Psychology Department and said the people there “helped me get healthy.”

Cockrell said, “I was a model, in every sense of the word. But I was suffering, through and through. That’s what depression can do.

“Depression can look like someone who has a 3.9 GPA.”

Cockrell earned national attention with a graduation speech in 2019, when she talked about her mental health struggles and the need for people to seek help when needed.

Her speech went viral, but there’s an interesting story about it.

“I was busy with a lot of other things, and I didn’t get started on the speech,” she said. “On the day of the speech, I got up at 4 a.m. and just decided to tell the truth.”

Best days are ahead?

Gilbert-Smith said Cockrell’s best days are ahead of her.

In a 2021 interview with USA Today, Gilbert-Smith said, “Anna did a lot of great things. But she was never happy. Now, she’s actually happy.”

Cockrell continues to run professionally. She said she is looking forward to competing in the World Open in 2026 and 2027, then in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

“How great would that be, running in the Olympics in Los Angeles,” she said.

She said sprinters typically don’t reach their peak until their early to mid-30s.

Lawrence said she certainly believes Cockrell can compete in Los Angeles and succeed.

“Anna was the prime example of trusting the process and being patient,” she said. “Every time she showed up, she really showed up and practiced like she had never won a medal in her life.”

Gilbert-Smith predicted, “She’s going to be one of the most amazing leaders that this country has ever seen, and it’s going to transcend track and field.”

Cockrell said a lot of it goes back to those early days at Providence Day under Lawrence.

“I’m grateful that she was more stubborn than me,” she said.

This story was originally published November 24, 2025 at 5:30 AM.