THE FLATS — Senior Nahom Solomon was named to the 2017-18 Google Cloud Academic All-District Men’s Track/Cross Country Team, it was announced Tuesday.
Selected by CoSIDA, the award recognizes the nation’s top student-athletes for their combined performances athletically and academically. First-team academic all-district honorees advance to the academic all-America ballot with those teams being announced in June.
Solomon’s year culminated in a qualification to the 2018 NCAA Championships in Eugene, Ore., last week as he became the second Yellow Jacket in school history to qualify in the 10K. Finishing seventh overall (29:24.44) in the race with the eighth-fastest time in NCAA East Prelims history, Solomon extended his already impressive track and field season that saw him become one of Tech’s greatest long-distance runners in school history.
Just this year, Solomon broke four Georgia Tech track and field records, beginning with the indoor 3000m — running a time of 8:02.00, which is 1.13 seconds faster than the previous record set in 2016. From there, the Shiloh, Ga. native became the first Yellow Jacket to run a sub-14-minute 5000m time (indoor or outdoor) by breaking the 15-year-old indoor 5K record (13:59.71) at the 2018 ACC Indoor Championships. Once in outdoor, his record-breaking season continued by adding the 46-year-old 5K (13:51.92) and the 10K (29:07.98) records to his resume.
Prior to the track and field season, Solomon etched his name as one of the cross country greats, becoming the first Yellow Jacket since 1994 to be named an all-American — one of just three ACC runners to earn the honor. In addition to running the fastest time in 23 years for a Georgia Tech cross country runner at the 2017 NCAA Championships, Solomon led Tech in every cross country race he competed in over the final two years of his career.
In the classroom, Solomon became Georgia Tech’s first recipient of the ACC Cross Country Scholar-Athlete of the Year award, carrying an impressive 3.85 fall GPA while majoring in computer engineering before touting a 3.75 GPA in the spring.
