LA JOLLA, Calif. — It is impossible to tell the story of UC San Diego track and field star Zeinab Torabi without mentioning family. For starters, her father Emil, who played a key role in her choice to attend UC San Diego, was himself a volleyball player for the Tritons. When Zeinab, a team captain for the past two seasons, talks about her squad and her coaches, she refers to them not only as teammates and mentors, but as a family. Finally, off the track, there is her Afghan heritage: a family history so rich you could write a book about it. In fact, she is doing just that.
 
Zeinab's family left Afghanistan in 1979, during the Soviet invasion, and while her parents have lived basically their entire lives in the United States, they have stayed connected to their home culture and encouraged Zeinab to do the same.
 
"Culture has been a big thing of mine, the big emphasis that (my family) played throughout my life," she says. "My dad's aunt, who lives in San Diego, we're working on a book together about our family ancestry and just documenting it because it is really cool. We're actually descended from the royal family of Afghanistan, so she is like, 'even though we came to this new country, we don't want to forget where we come from,' especially because it is so cool."
 
Working with her great aunt Mahjuba, Zeinab has been tracing her ancestry back through Afghanistan, putting leaves on the branches of a family tree which reaches the former ruler of Afghanistan — Emir Dost Mohammed Khan Barakzai — her great, great, great uncle. Dost Mohammed ruled from 1826 until his death in 1863, and was responsible for both reuniting a divided Afghanistan and fending off a British invasion.
 
"Knowing information about him and his whole legacy, he was really involved with the Anglo-Afghan wars against the British," she explains. "Going through each ancestor and finding cool stories about them has been really fun and it has been really eye-opening for me too."
 
But for Zeinab, the book is more than an interesting family history project. It is one of the ways she is reconnecting with her heritage.
 
"Growing up, I lived in Michigan," she says. "I was the only person who looked how I did, and so I had never really been in touch — I spoke Farsi when I was younger and ate a lot of Afghan food — but other than that I didn't really know much about the history, so it has been me reconnecting with that part of me recently."
 
Along with diving into the stories of her ancestors, Zeinab has rediscovered her love for Afghan food.
 
"I used to really like Italian, but now Italian is second," she says, laughing. "I think my favorite dish is every Afghan's favorite dish. It's like these Afghan dumplings, and it's got meat in them, it's got yogurt on top and a bunch of different spices, and we call it mantu, it's really good."
 
And Zeinab's Afghan roots are not the only family culture she has been reconnecting with. A captain of the track and field team since 2021, she has long referred to her squad as a family, but when the COVID-19 pandemic brought an early end to the 2020 track and field season, it also put team traditions on pause, disrupting that family atmosphere. As restrictions began to lift, she made an extra effort to get herself and her teammates reconnected to their traditions.
 
 "I'm glad that I was here before COVID and was able to experience what team culture was like at that time," she says. "I'm glad that I was able to experience all those fun activities and all those team bonding things we did in the past, and since I've been a team captain for the past two years, trying to bring that back now that life is starting to get back to normal, having that experience from before has been helpful. We used to do team dinners, and this and that, bringing all those back to revive it before I leave has been super important."
 
2022 was Zeinab's last year as a Triton, having graduated at the end of the winter quarter, and while she says now that she wouldn't trade her time in La Jolla for the world, she initially only considered UC San Diego because of her dad, a former Triton volleyball player.
 
"UC San Diego was one of the schools that were interested, but they were the only D-II school, most of the other schools were D-I," she says, remembering her recruiting process. "So, it was kind of on the bottom of my list, and my dad had gone here too, so I was like, 'I want to do something different, I don't want to go where my dad went, but I'll take a tour, just to appease my dad,' it was so far on the bottom of my list. And then I came here, and I fell in love. Literally, it was love at first sight."
 
After five years, she leaves as one of the Tritons' best ever hurdlers. A qualifier for the 2019 NCAA Division II National Championships, she ends her career in La Jolla at seventh on the program's all-time list in the 400 meter hurdles, a list which includes 2012 Olympian Christine Merrill. As for whether she'll keep running track in the future, Zeinab isn't committing to anything just yet.
 
"I'm not sure what the future holds for track specifically, but I'm a very athletic person and have been for my entire life, so if anything, honestly, I might pick up skiing as a sport," she says. "I've tried it once and I love the speed, so it's so much fun and if I could do that… it's not very accessible in Southern California, but there's Big Bear and stuff like that. I'm thinking maybe surfing in the summer, skiing in the winter, I might do something like that."
 
And when it comes to career plans, she hopes her book project is not the only story she'll be telling.
 
"My love is filmmaking," she explains. "I think it's really cool, it's like an art. I can't draw, I can't dance, I can't sing, but I can put videos together, and I've got an eye when it comes to design and that kind of stuff. I love the visual aspect of it, visual storytelling. That's something I'm really passionate about, just storytelling in general. Like working on the book, that's telling stories, it's another outlet of that. I definitely have more of a creative side to me that I really enjoy, so we'll see where it takes me."
 
While she may not know where the next chapter of her story will take her yet, it would be a safe bet to say she knows where she is coming from.

About UC San Diego Athletics
After two decades as one of the most successful programs in NCAA Division II, the UC San Diego intercollegiate athletics program has begun a new era as a member of the Big West Conference in NCAA Division I. The 23-sport Tritons earned 30 team and nearly 150 individual national championships during its time in Divisions II and III and helped guide 1,400 scholar-athletes to All-America honors. A total of 83 Tritons have earned Academic All-America honors, while 38 have garnered prestigious NCAA Post Graduate Scholarships. UC San Diego scholar-athletes exemplify the academic ideals of one of the world's preeminent institutions, graduating at an average rate of 90 percent, the highest rate among public institutions in Division I or II. For more information on the Tritons, visit UCSDtritons.com or follow UC San Diego Athletics on social media @UCSDtritons.