The Bluefield State University Men's and Women's Track and Field Teams won the USCAA National Championship Invitational Saturday in Springfield, Massachusetts. The B-State men dominated the meet, using a 203-point effort to breeze past top-five finishers SUNY-ESF (163), Albany College of Pharmacy (124.5), Florida National (61), and the University of Maine-Fort Kent (53. The women used strong outings from the jumps and hurdles squads to come from behind in the day's final events, topping defending champion Maine-Fort Kent 183-153. The Mississippi University for Women (114) finished third, while SUNY-ESF (78) and Florida National (47) rounded out the top five team finishers.
"In year two of a program's life span, to win a title at any level, in any fashion—that's an impressive achievement," said B-State Head Track and Field and Cross Country Coach Brooks Rexroat. "These young women and young men have a lot to be proud of in terms of how they've established a tone of expectation for the program, and there's a lot to look forward to as they grow and continue to elevate their training and understanding of what championship-level track and field looks and feels like. These wins were huge steps for us that will help us understand what we're pushing toward as we look forward to B-State's entry into the CIAA."
En route to the team titles, B-State took 10 individual and relay championships and set USCAA Championship Meet Records in the men's 4X100-meter relay (McKinley Pennix, Joey Isaacs, Jalen Jones and Tyson Mickie) and the women's long and triple jump (Raelyn Vadala).
"Our men won with depth, and our women won by posting individual wins," Rexroat said. "Those are two very different ways to win a meet in this sport, but they both worked today for our respective squads. The men didn't necessarily win every event, but then we followed up in second, third and fourth places and just took points from every direction. The women's team is smaller and we've had some injuries that left us a little thin on numbers, but the athletes who lined up with us today exceeded everything we could have imagined in terms of their physical performance, their tenacity, and their approach to the competition."
B-State's men pulled out to an early lead and never looked back.
In the 4X100, B-State upended the top-seeded squad from the Mississippi University for Women and went on to win the race by nearly two seconds, smashing both the B-State school record and the USCAA meet record. Myles Rice took a commanding lead on his second throw in the shot put, resulting in a gold medal performance. Darius Brown led from start to finish in the men's triple jump while McKinley Pennix took a convincing win in the long jump.
Mickie took third in the 100-meter dash, Isaacs finished a close second at 200 meters, and Pennix took second in a tough 400-meter dash, followed closely by Jones in sixth. Ben Walker took third in the 110-meter hurdles, and teammates Tyler Davis and Austin Sigman propelled each other toward third and fourth place finishes (respectively) in the 3000-meter steeplechase. Sigman also finished eighth in the 800-meter race.
In the field events, Dieuvens Lebreton and Trevor Nefe took second and third in the high jump, while Brown and Pennix were titling in the horizontal jumps.
In the throws, Big Blue athletes populated nearly half of the scoring marks, utterly dominating the point talleys in those events. Following Rice's win in the shot put, teammates Samba Jah, Sherman Franklin, and Ethan Spangler took the fifth, seventh, and eight spots, tallying 17 points in the event. Escamilla (second), Franklin (third), Rice (fourth), and Spangler (eighth) produced 20 points in the hammer throw, while Lebreton, Franklin, and Escamilla finished second through fourth in the javelin throw. In the discus, Escamilla, Sherman, and Rice took second, third, and seventh.
The men's 4X400 meter relay team (Pennix, Jones, Isaacs, Nefe) closed things out with a third-place finish.
"Our men got contributions from every event group, at every tier of point category," Rexroat said. "We were the most well-rounded group out there, and it put us over the top. Jumps were outstanding as always, sprints were even better than anticipated, the distance group outpaced their seeds for big points, and the throws group just put the team on its back as it has all year long. This is an exciting young group that has a lot of excellence on the horizon."
In the women's meet, Khrisalyn Kegler swept the titles in both hurdle races, Kateryna Dashevska set a new B-State school record on her way to her win in the javelin throw, and Beyonka Lee unleashed a throw nearly a meter further than her previous lifetime best to steal the shot put championship.
In addition to wins and new meet records in the long and triple jump, Vadala racked up 42 points across seven events, easily claiming the high score honors for the meet. Vadala's point tally alone would have tied for sixth place among the 17 teams that scored at the contest.
Some early-meet hiccups left the Big Blue women's squad trailing the expected point tally.
"We (the coaches) scored the meet out almost weekly leading into the championship and we had a good idea what to expect from every team. There was never a moment when we expected to pull into a 30-point lead, on the women's side and when some things didn't go our way early on, we got a little nervous about dropping into either second or even third place. But Kateryna came up huge in the javelin and absolutely shook up the whole meet's scoring tables (she entered the meet seeded tenth), then Beyonka Lee shrugged off some early struggles on a wet surface in the hammer throw and disc to come up absolutely huge with a one-meter lifetime personal best in the shot put to seal up on the win.
Kegler was followed in the 100-meter hurdles by Vadala, Arianna Wickliff, and Kayla Havens as B-State swept the top four spots. In the 400-meter hurdles, Kegler upset the top seeded entry from the Mississippi University for Women, with Vadala, Wickliff, and Havens finishing third through fifth.
Wickliff finished second in the pole vault, followed by Karlee Williams and Rylee Truslow in third and fourth. Wickliff initially appeared to have won the event, but an official measuring error led to a re-jump later in the competition and a win for the competitor from Hampshire.
In both the long and triple jump, Dashevksa followed Vadala's win with a second-place finish, while Havens took fourth in the long jump and fifth in the triple jump.
Rori Cox finished second in an extended high jump competition that was delayed several times due to weather and a slick competition surface. Vadala took fourth in the event and BriShaela McHaney finished sixth.
Oliviah Green had a big day, finishing third in the hammer, fifth in the discus, and eighth in the javelin, where she was edged out by teammate and seventh-place finisher Truslow.
Lee wasn't alone in the shot put, as teammate Coraly Dupree tossed a huge lifetime best to follow up with a third-place finish.
The Big Blue relay squad of Kegler, Havens, Vadala, and Cox took third in the 4X100-meter race, while Kegler, Havens, Vadala, and McHaney finished fourth in the 4X400-meter race.
"We knew the hurdlers and jumpers and vaulters would carry us, but they absolutely squeezed every point they could out of the meet, and it was absolutely beautiful to see the meet unfold the way it did," Rexroat said. "This was a true team effort, and every single person played a role in it. That's what I love so much about this sport. There's no bench. There's no one that's just happy to be on the bus. Everyone played their part brilliantly, and we came back to West Virginia with a pair of trophies that could not have been any more well-earned by this team." Complete meet results can be found at: https://www.hampshireathletics.com/sports/track/2022-23/files/USCAA_Nationals_2023.pdf
