Double duty: Jolie Robinson thrives as parent, heptathlete at UC Irvine ...Middle East

IRVINE — The first of the heptathlon’s seven events is the 100-meter hurdles, 10 obstacles all in a row, threatening to derail an athlete’s competition almost as soon as it begins, each barrier looming seemingly larger than the previous one.

It is a prospect that leaves even the most experienced and gifted of athletes anxious.

UC Irvine’s Jolie Robinson, one of the nation’s top heptathlon prospects, is both more gifted and anxious than most.

So as she settles into blocks for the hurdles, placing her fingertips up against the starting line, against the beginning of two physically and emotionally draining days of competition, women’s track and field’s most demanding event, Robinson looks down at the collection of tattoos that decorate her right forearm for strength and reassurance.

There’s a tattoo of a bee, a tribute to her grandmother Beverly Robinson, known to her family as “Bumblebee.”

“So that’s just for her,” Robinson said.

Between a bouquet of lilies and a bird is the inscription “Matthew 6,” a Bible verse that refers to both of them: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” The tattoos are anchored by the number “7.”

“The seven is a Biblical number,” Robinson said. “And also my mom’s birthday is on the seventh. And I do heptathlon, which is seven events. So that’s just ties into a lot.

“Matthew 6, because in that chapter, it talks about … the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, that they don’t worry because God provides for them. So I am a worrier, just like with everything I go through in life, and I overthink and stuff, but it helps you not to worry. You can only focus on one thing at a time, which kind of helps in the (heptathlon). It’s like one event at a time, that’s all I can control.

“Those two days (in a heptathlon) I look at it a lot. Especially the 7, I look at it a lot because it’s a good reminder, because even in the blocks, I can see it and everything. So it’s always there.”

She was quiet, shy and sensitive as a girl, preferring to knit alone in her room instead of joining her siblings playing sports.

“A recluse,” recalled Harry Robinson, her father.

Today she remains soft spoken, yet she could not be more open about who she is. Her life is there for all the world to see, told by the art that covers her body like words on a page, the story of her resilience and her hope, of a faith that is more than just skin deep.

As much as anything, the flowers and verse, the birds and the bees, the numbers lucky and spiritual make up a thread that connects two Jolie Robinsons on two Mother’s Days six years apart: the scared and overwhelmed 18-year-old worried about telling her siblings that she was pregnant, bracing herself for the response of her friends and community, and the 24-year-old who today exudes a quiet confidence and a sense of peace in her choices, the proud mother who in three seasons at UC Irvine has emerged as a multiple Big West champion yet is still only beginning to realize her potential as an athlete and a human, a role model to hundreds of girls and young women, pregnant and scared, hoping to follow the path she has forged.

That transformation is reflected in a recent tattoo — a koi fish.

“I designed for my son, because koi fish stand for new beginnings in life. And I feel like when I had my son, it kind of like just changed. It was like a whole new chapter of my life. So it kind of restarted who I was and everything.

“A different mindset.”

Despite being away from the sport for three years, Robinson has been the most dominant field athlete in the Big West the past three seasons. She won the heptathlon and was runner-up in the long jump in 2023, a feat she duplicated at last spring’s Big West Championships while also adding a fifth-place finish in the javelin.

Robinson joined teammates Esmeray Demirbas, Lauren Aquino and Jazzmine Davis in breaking a 13-year-old school record in the 4×400-meter relay with a 3 minute, 41.03 second clocking at the Mt. SAC Relays last month.

A week earlier, she posted a personal best 5,489 points in her season-opening heptathlon at the Bryan Clay Invitational, at the time the nation’s fifth-best collegiate mark in 2025, setting personal bests in three events but posting sub-par performances in her top two events — the long jump and javelin.

“Then really everything else can improve a little bit, because it was still just getting used to doing a hep again after I haven’t done one in a while,” Robinson said of her first heptathlon in 11 months. “So I feel like everything has room for improvement.”

Matching her personal bests in the long jump and javelin would have added another 223 points alone. Which not only puts Lauren Collins’ 16-year-old school record of 5,549 in danger, but also begins a conversation about whether Robinson, with another year of eligibility remaining, is also a threat to break the Big West record of 5,986 points set by UCSB’s Barbara Nwaba in 2012.

“For Jolie, she has tons of potential in the near future as she’s very raw as an athlete and will get better when she specializes in the events individually,” said UCI head coach Jeff Perkins.

After a recent training session, Robinson lifted her right forearm and pointed to the source of her strength, tracing her finger along a series of letters in the script of a child’s hand: M-I-C-A-I-A-H

The name of her 5-year-old son.

“So people know my story, and I really had to get past all of the negative things people would say,” Robinson said. “And I feel like now it goes in one ear out the other. You know before, it used to affect me. But, yeah, confidence-wise, like in high school, even before, like a big race or a big meet or something, I would have (a negative) thought and I would have felt the pressure and let it get to me.

“But now I can separate track and know that in a few years, that’s something I’ll look back on, but I have something way more important in my life, my son. So it’s like, if I’m running the (4×400 relay), it’s, ‘This is one lap around the track,’ and it’s not life or death, you know. I know after this, no matter how I do, I can go back home to my son and I make him dinner, and there’s bigger things in life where I can not get so anxious about things, and I just do my best and have more fun.

“I definitely, like, lost some friends through it, but there was a lot of I kind of separated, you know, people I wanted to keep in my life, like, who are my real friends and not. In high school, because I was an athlete, you know, people saying that that’s not a smart option for me and all of that. But yeah, it was mainly just people saying that I was so young and I had so much opportunity and that because right after I had my son, I became a single mom, and me and his dad weren’t together. So being a single mom that has its own kind of stigma and what people think about that, but I, at that point, I wasn’t really letting it get to me. I think, through my life in the past few years and everything, I’ve proved people wrong many times. Yeah, so people that, you know, thought I wouldn’t be able to succeed, they can see my story now and, like, see what I’ve done, and realize that you can, we can do that even being like a single mom.

“And so I can walk into a meet, head held high, you know, shoulders back and not, not feel the like pressure that people, would want to put on me, because there’s, I have so many other things in life, and this is just part of my journey, and it’s fun, and my son gets to watch me and look up to me, and no matter how I do, he’s proud of me.”

Robinson, the youngest of four children, was born into a deeply religious and athletic family. Harry Robinson has served as a pastor for years. He played football and ran track in high school. Carmen played volleyball in her native British Columbia. Cole Robinson, Jolie’s brother, played football for Idaho State.But Jolie as a young girl resisted joining in the family’s athletic pursuits.

“She was just the homebody all the while,” Harry Robinson said. “Even when she went to watch her other siblings play sports, you know, she’d just kind of be recluse to herself and her own little things. So she was just naturally in her own little world, you know, knowing what she wanted to do, she didn’t, I don’t think, I don’t feel like she had any pressure to be or do what anybody else was doing. She just did what she did.”

Carmen Robinson recalled how her daughter “loved to knit and do crafts, be in her room by herself and just do that for hours. She just really didn’t have an interest in sports. All she wanted to do was craft and knit. And she used to joke about how when she grew up, she wanted to live in a cardboard box because she didn’t need anything, and she didn’t want any material things, and she just wanted a simple life. And that was her.”

Then in sixth grade, Robinson was talked into joining the volleyball team at her school.

“Okay, literally, all of a sudden, something clicked in her, and she didn’t even, I didn’t even think, she thought she could be an athlete like, and then all of a sudden, not only was she good, like, she was really good,” Carmen Robinson said. “And, you know, even just her stature and her frame and her muscle development and all that just took on a whole new shape when she started playing sports. ‘Where did this girl come from? Look at those legs.’”

She continued to turn heads on the volleyball court at Capistrano Valley High School. But it was in track and field where she really excelled, reaching the CIF Southern Section finals in both the long and triple jumps and attracting scholarship offers from Division I universities.

Yet her athletic success did not translate into personal confidence, and then in March 2019, her senior year at Capo Valley, she realized she was pregnant. She was 18.

Robinson kept her pregnancy a secret at first before finally telling her parents that April.

“It was definitely a shock,” Harry Robinson said. “I did not expect it. I don’t mean if any of my kids ever she would not have been like that was not on my radar at all. But, you know, I just knew that I loved her, and it was, we’re gonna work this out, and it’s gonna be a big shock to us. And I don’t think it hit me immediately.”

He wasn’t alone.

“I know she had to come to terms with the reality of what had happened before she could even talk to us as her parents or her family, which I get that, and I respect that,” Carmen Robinson said. “And of course, we had to do a lot of processing, right? I mean, this impacted us and impacted me emotionally, my first grandchild for one, of course, you know, I would have to get to the point of being thrilled about it. At the beginning that was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ that you have given up your scholarship. This is, you know, you’re not married. There’s a lot of things that are out of order here, and this is going to be really, really tough. And so I we didn’t get as much time as maybe I needed to process and really come to terms with it.”

It wasn’t until Mother’s Day that Robinson told her siblings.

“So at our Mother’s Day dinner, my siblings didn’t know what was going on, but my parents were trying to keep it in and, like, because they were going through a lot of emotions and all of that. And then my dad was, he’s been like a pastor my whole life growing up, so that was something kind of hard to break to him, but I knew, like, he would always love and accept me and like, all of that. So, like, it was just kind of like the initial like, telling them. And then, like, a few weeks later, I told my siblings, and then, but I didn’t tell anyone in my school, any coaches, anyone, anything.”

She set two of her three school records while pregnant that spring. She verbally committed to Northern Arizona to keep up appearances.

“Just so that people didn’t think, like, ‘Why are you not committing?’” she said.

Finally, on the night of her graduation, Robinson revealed her secret to her community.

“There’s a thing at my high school called ‘Capo grad confessions.’” Robinson said, referring to a tradition of hashtagged confessionals by Capo Valley grads on social media. “So people would post things that they did that, like, you know, that were not good, but once you graduated, you can’t get in trouble for it.”

That night Robinson, next to the hashtag on her social media, posted a photo of her ultrasound.

“I think I had like, one or two close friends that knew, but everyone else was like, ‘Is this real?’ Like they didn’t believe it. So that was how I announced it to the whole world, and then from there, I just, I accepted it, and I didn’t, I didn’t let people kind of talk,” Robinson said. “I mean, there was probably other people talking, saying things that I didn’t hear, but I already made my decision, and I was, I accepted it once I told everyone. So I was kind of ready for all the backlash.”

Within minutes, Robinson was the talk of the town. Everybody, it seemed, had a question.

“And all of a sudden she just was like, rip the band-aid off,” Carmen Robinson said. “She’s like, you know what? Why am I going to hide this? And you know, I think that even that decision right there, she was like, you know, this is reality and I’m going to deal with all the repercussions, you know.

“And I don’t think she was doing it in any way to be rude or disrespectful to me or her family, but it certainly was like, ‘Oh, now I’ve got it. I’ve got to come to terms with it and be able to talk to people about it and when they say, ‘How are you doing? How are you feeling?’ It’s like, well, I’m in emotional upheaval, actually,” Carmen Robinson said, referring to herself. “So it was, I mean, we got through that, I just was a bit surprised that that’s how it came out. I figured it would eventually come out. And then I think she didn’t want it to be, she didn’t want to be gossiped about. She wanted to just come straight out and say it. Want the truth? Here’s the truth. On her terms.”

Still, the gossip persisted.

“Obviously, being people of faith, there was that whole aspect of it too,” Carmen Robinson said. “So it wasn’t just the reality of having a teen girl who’s pregnant and not married or whatever, but then it was like the whole, like you call yourselves Christians and blah, blah, blah. So there was all of that surrounding it too. So we, you know, there was, there was a part of it. I think, really, we just, like, for me, it was just honesty and integrity. It’s like, yeah, this wasn’t, this wasn’t ideal. It was out of order. This wouldn’t have been the way we wanted. But you know what, ultimately, we believe to her a blessing. We want this child. She had no desire to, you know, abort or give it up. She knew she’d have the support right there. Her whole family was right there around beside her to say, like, you know, we’re gonna love this child. … Like, this is, this is just a new reality, you know? So, I mean, I think that didn’t all happen instantaneously, but it was obviously over time, when the reality really sets in, and all of a sudden, now this baby is coming, you just change your mindset about it.”

During her pregnancy, Robinson and the baby’s father split up.

“They had a rift in their relationship,” Carmen Robinson said. “They weren’t going to remain in relationships together. So that was, that was difficult. And then how do you at 18,19, 20 years old? How do you navigate all that, right, and kind of get together? That’s really tough.”

On December 6, 2019, Robinson’s 19th birthday, Micaiah was born.

“So I feel like before, I was not a very confident person, like, especially in athletics and stuff, I feel like confidence was a big thing for me starting off in sports, and having to learn that,” Robinson said. “So also, I was in not the healthiest relationship with my son’s father, and kind of knowing what I deserved and what was best for me. So it’s just a lot of not knowing who I was through that. And then I feel like when I found out I was pregnant my senior year, it almost there was some type of peace knowing where usually in high school, a girl would freak out about that, which I was a little freaked out, but I just felt like, God had a plan for me, and that it just made sense, that this is where I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do in life, and that’s when people always ask me, ‘Did you ever consider not keeping your son?’ And that never was an option for me, because I just knew I would be able to handle it. I have a loving family, supportive family, and it just felt like that’s where my life was meant to go. And then through that, my mental toughness really changed, and my confidence and because there was a lot of people having negative things to say about what I did with like being known as, the athlete at my school, and they’re, ‘You’re ruining your life by having a kid right now,’ and all of that. And then, at first, I just accepted that. I’m done playing sports. I’m just going to be a mom.”

She and Micaiah lived with her parents. She took online classes at a local community college and, like the rest of the world, waited out the pandemic.

“But then watching the (2021) Summer Olympics, my parents could tell I missed it, and they were saying, ‘If you want to go back and compete, we’ll support you, we’ll help you, whatever you need,’” Robinson said. “And I because, like, I always heard the doubt that people had that, like, you can’t balance all that. You can’t do that … Once I found out I was pregnant, I felt that loss. Sports has always kind of been my thing. All, all through high school. So it was kind of like a sudden, like I was expecting to go to college and have at least four more years of this. So it was a loss I had to deal with. And then once I started watching the Olympics again, and it really brought those kind of emotions up in me. Where was I? I missed that. And that’s when my parents could tell that it was kind of affecting me. So that’s when they’re, ‘Hey, you can go back.’”

A family friend worked in the Saddleback College athletic department. Not long after the Olympic flame was extinguished in Tokyo, Robinson was practicing with the Saddleback volleyball team. That spring she won the heptathlon, javelin and long jump at the CCCAA State Championships.

“I didn’t even know what the heptathlon was, and then once I found out what it was, I kind of in the beginning of that season, I asked my coach if I could try that, and he told me no,” Robinson said. “So then another few weeks or so passed, and he’s like, ‘Ok, you can try it if you want.’ And then from there, then he was like, ‘Oh, maybe you could do this, actually.’”

It was an opinion shared by UCI’s Perkins.

“He was actually the last (Division I) coach I talked to before choosing a four-year school to transfer to,” Robinson said. “So it was after my first year in junior college, and I was kind of mentally preparing that I was going to stay another year in junior college just because it was I want to play volleyball again. It was going to be my last season. But then a lot of coaches were talking to me once that season was over, but it was in summer that coach Perkins reached out to me, and I didn’t even think about UCI. I don’t know why, and even though it’s the closest school, and once I talked to him, I can tell the difference from our conversation to all the other coaches I talked to, where all the other coaches talk just about me and what I would score for their team. And they never brought anything up about my son. But Coach Perkins, the first things he was bringing up is how the program would be good for not just me, but also being a mom. And with my son, and all the coaches here have kids close to my son’s age too, so they understand that. And when I was telling him that my son comes first, so it’s like, if I need to not be at practice because of he has a doctor’s appointment, he has something come up, then that’s going to be a priority. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, of course.’ And my son comes to practice often, and it’s just like a normal, normal thing, and they’ll hold his hand walking around the track while I’m running or while I’m doing something. The whole team kind of helps.”

Robinson’s working relationship with Perkins goes beyond the athlete-coach dynamic. They’ve also connected as parents.

“Jolie is the epitome of a multitasker and when I knew that she was going to be juggling athletics, her education, and raising a son I knew that I could understand her situation being a parent myself, and knowing all the things that I have to juggle in my daily life,” Perkins said. “I was able to get her to trust that I had her best intentions at heart when joining our team and that her son would always come first. Her family support here in the local area is tremendous, and that definitely helped a lot in her decision-making.”

Robinson had one more condition before committing to UCI: she wanted to play one final volleyball season at Saddleback.

“And he was like, if that’s what you want to do, then it’s like, just be careful, you know?” Robinson said laughing, referring to Perkins.

Robinson was worth the wait. She won the 2023 Big West heptathlon title, UCI’s first in the event in 16 years, scoring 5,343. She defended her Big West title last season but was frustrated that her training didn’t translate into a PR. Her 2024 season’s best was 5,220.

“I think I had a tougher season last year, just kind of connecting everything, like in practice, I felt like I was making progress, but I didn’t get a PR in my last season,” Robinson said. “So I feel like this year, I kind of understood each event better and knew how to compete, the way I practice and see the marks that I was expecting to see.”

She’s learned how to manage her emotions over what can be a two-day emotional roller coaster. Compartmentalizing, managing disappointment and excitement is almost an eighth event.

“I like to think of it taking one event at a time,” Robinson said. “So like, while I’m hurdling, I’m trying not to think about high jump, because I can only control what event I’m doing now, and then, as you move on, either if you did good or bad in an event, you have to kind of put to the back of your mind and not think about it, because if you let a bad event affect your next event, then it can just kind of domino effect. And if, even if you do really good, have a big PR in one event, you have to kind of forget about it and then focus on the next event and not let your emotions get too high and low, and gotta stay consistent through the whole thing.

“It’s something I’ve had to learn. Before in high school, doing track, it was something that was more difficult, but I think after having my son and everything, I can manage more stress and more, like, a lot of things going on, and I can, like, simplify it and not overthink. So I think being a mom has helped me simplify doing so much.”

Robinson was asked what prepared her for the heptathlon’s final event, the 800, which after two days of competition, can seem like a marathon.

She laughed.

“I always think every time we have a hard workout or anything, I’m like, ‘I’ve given birth,’” she said. “Nothing’s harder than that.”

Robinson, who now lives with her son in a townhouse not far from the UCI campus, is quick to point out she’s had a lot of help raising Micaiah: Her family, her coaches and teammates, and Micaiah’s father.

“Even though we’re not together, he’s been a lot of help, especially since I just moved out of my parents’ house,” Robinson said. “So now it’s really just kind of us co-parenting. So while I’m at practice or at class or whatever, his dad comes and watches him, because his dad works graveyard shift, so he’s during the day, he doesn’t really sleep. I don’t know when he sleeps, but he figures it out.

“So we kind of both help with the homeschooling and with all of that, but he’s been a big help, and that’s why on my social media, I have like, almost 100,000 followers. So and people like to always point out, ‘Oh, where’s his dad?’ No, his dad is in the picture, but his dad just doesn’t want to be posted on social media. So I always have to do a disclaimer, like, his dad is very much involved in his life, but he just doesn’t want to be on things.

“We dated for three years in high school, and he went to Capo too, and then we broke up. Because I just we probably should have been friends from the start, but and then so we kind of had, I don’t know, disagreements, and we didn’t always get along for like, that first year (after Micaiah’s birth), and then eventually we were like, ‘We don’t want to be like that.’ It just doesn’t make it easy for him. We want our son to have the best experience, I guess, we want to make it the best with his parents not being together, which can already be hard for kids, so we just kind of put all of our differences aside, and now we’re actually really good friends, and yeah, so it’s probably the best situation of co-parenting. And when I tell people that, ‘Oh, we’re actually just really cool,’ they rarely see that with co- parenting, like situations. But yeah, it’s worked out.”

Among those 100,000 followers on social media are dozens of young women and girls, high school, junior college and NCAA athletes, pregnant and scared and yet still trying to hold onto their dreams, who have reached out to Robinson, inspired by her, seeking hope in a story she’s told with her flesh and blood. With some of the women, she’s shared more than just her story, sending them Micaiah’s old clothes and shoes.

“A lot of messages from young moms, just finding out that they’re pregnant, and they haven’t told anyone else but me, a random person from across the country that they’ve never talked to, but they’ve seen my life and my story,” Robinson said. “I always tell them congratulations, and I know what you’re going through, and that’s a lot to put on mentally, and it’s just accepting that, when that’s what they decide that they want to do in life, that it is hard. So I feel like I’ve realized that once I started doing social media, when a lot of people, like young moms, would start to reach out to me. And just for those little experiences, I feel like that, I’ve encouraged young moms who (think), ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ But then I let them know, ‘You can do this. It’s not going to be easy and but you’re capable of a lot more than you think.’

“Recently, there’s been a few girls that found out that they were pregnant, and it’s a lot of times like where they still want to compete in their sport, but they don’t know how they’re going to do that and if they’re able to, and I kind of let them know what my what my day looks like with my schedule and the things that helped me get through it. But I feel like when you first find out you’re pregnant and kind of going through that, I let them know the things that I wish people told me when I was going through it. Because I always let them know that when people told me that I couldn’t do that, we’re actually starting to believe that, and then so I’m telling these girls that, don’t listen to that. Because, you can. I’m an example of that. You can do that, so don’t let that doubt kind of creep in that it’s not possible, because it is.”

She was asked if there was something she wished the 18-year-old Jolie, facing pregnancy and a world of uncertainty, would have been told on a Mother’s Day six year ago?

“Yeah, just that it’s very possible in that it almost makes the experience better,” she said. “I feel like, that’s what I tell people. The wins are gonna be so much sweeter than they were originally, because you have someone there with you and experiencing it with you. And when you overcome more, it just makes it a better experience. It’s exciting. And I feel like people didn’t show me the positive side of it, like, what positive could be.”

A post shared by Jolie Robinson (@jo_rawb)

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