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When Ocean Rideout walked up to Portland State's coaching staff at a recruitment camp for athletes, she was so nervous that a future teammate had to nudge her forward — go talk to them, go get your spot on this team. So she did. The coaches called her a diamond in the rough and couldn't understand how she hadn't been picked up yet. Rideout couldn't either, but from that moment on, she stopped wondering. She was a Viking.

What followed was four years of refusing to be put in a box. 

Rideout is graduating Summa Cum Laude with a 3.96 GPA, having competed in two Division I sports, pursued a pre-law track and completed a senior capstone that changed how she sees the world. Growing up, she was told again and again to pick a lane — one sport, one path. She never did.

That instinct is exactly how she ended up competing in track. In high school, she'd been told more than once that no one makes it in two sports at the college level, so when she first joined the team her sophomore year, it was only as a favor — they needed bodies, there was free food and a free trip. She was in. For a couple of seasons she ran a meet here and there without much training behind it. Then new coaches arrived this year with a different offer: a spot on the team, but only if she committed to training with them. She took it. It was then Rideout was introduced to the long jump, a brand new event for her. But one event was never going to be enough for her. She set her sights on the heptathlon — seven events across two days, four of which she had never attempted in her life. Within weeks she was learning the high jump, the shot put, the javelin and the 800 meter alongside teammates who had spent years perfecting them. They coached her through every rep anyway.

"I live by this philosophy that anybody can do anything," she says. "Maybe I'll be buns, but at least I'll do it. I'm just thankful people let me on the team."

That same willingness to step into the unknown carried into her senior capstone, which placed her at Donald E. Long juvenile facility, sitting with young people the system had already labeled and largely written off. One of the youth members told her plainly that she and her classmates were only there to benefit themselves, and that once they left, they would forget all about them. 

"It just says so much about the mindset of others," she says. "There are people — children — who have been discarded from society to the point where that's just what they expect from everyone who comes into their life. That really made me passionate about the juvenile justice system, and about learning to see people for people — not off a label, not off a paper, not based off what they've done. At the end of the day, a person is a person."

Law school, with a focus on the juvenile justice system, had already been taking shape as a direction. That room at Donald E. Long turned it into a purpose. Today she mentors a younger athlete one-on-one, working on confidence and the mental game and offering the kind of guidance she wishes someone had offered her.

For Rideout, that mentorship is inseparable from identity. As a Black, mixed-race woman and athlete, she is intentional about how she shows up. She does hair — braids, twists and historical styles rooted in Black cultural tradition — and steps onto the field each season with a new color. Green this year. When her hair is done, she says, she feels like no one can touch her, and she wants the young athletes of color who come after her to feel that same way when they see her.

"I carry Black identity everywhere I go," she says. "You are who you are. Everybody should be memorable."

That conviction is what Rideout carries into law school and whatever comes after it. Portland State gave her the room to discover who she wanted to be. She did the rest.