By Jack Pfeifer
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – After nearly four days of competition, Texas A&M took the lead in the final half-hour of both team competitions and swept the men’s and women’s NCAA titles in a nail-biting battle on national television Saturday afternoon at the University of Arkansas.
In the first staging ever of the outdoor championships here, at the spanking new stadium built in honor of the legendary retired coach, John McDonnell, the home Hogs were unable to be in close contention for a title they won innumerable times under McDonnell, but they did keep their home fans happy with plenty of favored sons in action. Under new Coach Chris Bucknam, they wound up with 27 points, for 9th place, in the men’s competition. The Arkansas women’s team scored 10.
Arkansas did not win an individual championship.
Oregon, which had been a slight favorite to win one or both of the titles, wound up 2nd in each. The Ducks did not have a 4x400 team in either sex and thus were frustrated in the late going and could only watch as other contending teams kept putting up points while they had no one left on the bench.
In the end, in a dramatic finale to the men’s meet, four teams in the concluding 4x4 had a chance to win that title – including Oregon, which could only watch as the 4x4 teams from A&M, Florida State and Florida stepped on the track for the last race of the meet. A&M needed to finish 2nd or better to win the meet, and that’s just what they did, running a school-record 3:00.91 to finish 2nd to Florida State. In the home straight, Justin Oliver held off Quentin Iglehart-Summers of archrival Baylor to preserve the win, the first-ever national championship in track and field for the Aggies.
By winning the race, FSU scored 10 points to catch Oregon with 46 points, 2 points short of A&M’s total. Florida, which lost its anchorman, freshman Christian Taylor, to an injury moments earlier, scored 5 points for 4th and also wound up with 46, thus creating a rare 3-way tie for 2nd place. Other combinations could have even produced a 4-way tie for 1st, or if teams not in contention had taken the top places, Oregon, which had been in the lead most of the week, could have still won outright.
It was nearly as close in the women’s competition, until Round 5 of the triple jump, when Yasmine Regis vaulted from 6th place to 2nd to clinch the meet for A&M, 50-43, with Oregon again 2nd. Arizona State (41) and Florida State (40) were close behind.
Oregon, which has not won an outdoor NCAA team championship in 25 years, had entered this meet with dreams of sweeping both team titles and also of winning the sport’s men’s Triple Crown – cross country, indoor and outdoor track. They had won the first two legs. They had already planned a celebration back on the campus in Eugene Saturday evening, an appointment the team would be able to keep because they traveled to the meet by private charter.
The victories by A&M were a personal redemption for Coach Pat Henry, who left behind the dynasty he had built at LSU to move to College Station five years ago. These were the first national team titles at his new campus.
New York track fans may recall most of these teams from the annual New Balance Collegiate Invitational, held every February at the Armory. Virtually all of the Top 10 teams in both sexes from this year’s Championships competed in that meet this winter, including A&M, Oregon, Florida State, LSU (5th in men’s here, 6th in women’s), USC (10th and 8th), South Carolina (6th in men’s), Baylor and Tennessee (tied for 10th in women’s), and Arkansas.
A&M won the men’s meet despite disqualification on Friday in the 4x100. Oregon had its own casualty, when the freshman Matthew Centrowitz, one of the favorites in the 1,500, ran last in his heat because of a stress fracture. Oregon, it turned out, had known of the injury for some time but had been nursing it along, hoping Centrowitz – the son of the former Ducks star miler, Matt Centrowitz – could run the final. In the end, it was not to be.
Late Friday night, two events took an ominous turn for Oregon. In the men’s javelin, the favorite, Cyrus Hostetler, finished 4th and threw 238-6, 34 feet below his seasonal best. In the women’s pole vault, Melissa Gergel, one of the favorites, failed to score, opening the door for A&M.
All Oregon had left on the final day – timed for a noon start to accommodate network television – was Keshia Baker in the women’s 400 and two male middle-distancemen, Andrew Wheating in the 800 and little-known Jordan McNamara in the 1,500.
Baker ran valiantly with a lifetime best of 51.29 but it was good enough just for 5th place. Joanna Atkins of Auburn won in 50.39 while A&M’s favored Jessica Beard held on for 2nd, holding off Francena McCorory of Hampton, who stumbled in the final strides, 50.56-50.58. The first seven finishers ran lifetime bests.
A&M crept closer to the Ducks when Gabby Mayo finished 4th in the 100 hurdles, but when her freshman teammate, Vashti Thomas, failed to finish, A&M still trailed, with only triplejumper Regis left in their deck. Regis advanced to the finals in 6th place, then jumped 45-4 ½ in Round 5 to finish 2nd.
The triple jump was crucial to their men’s success as well. The Aggies had four placewinners, scoring 18 points, setting them up for the 4x4 finale.
The Oregon men stayed alive when Wheating, the tall Olympian from Vermont, chased down Texas’s Tevan Everett in the final few yards to win a dramatic race, the handful of vocal Oregon fans on hand here on their feet cheering wildly. A number of them had driven cross-country some 2,000 miles from the Pacific Northwest here to the hill country of Northwest Arkansas.
It was a replay of the 2008 800, when Wheating trailed Jacob Hernandez, also a Longhorn, only to catch him at the tape, only in that case Hernandez was the winner. This year, Hernandez was out with an injury, so his teammate, Everett, stepped in admirably in his place.
Most of the runners in that dramatic 800 here had run in the Armory in February, including Wheating, Everett, Chris Gowell of Baylor, Richard Jones of LSU and Sean Tully of Villanova.
Tully, the senior from Syosset, had been trying to become the first Wildcat to win the men’s NCAA 800 since Don Paige in 1980. He wound up 6th here, but in the prelims recorded the first sub-1:47 of his career.
Wheating’s 10 points increased Oregon’s fragile lead, but when the 12 1,500 runners took the line, the Ducks desperately needed a few more points as a cushion. Only McNamara – the last qualifier out of the West Regional and the last qualifier out of the semis here – remained for the Ducks. He stayed in contact, but the fast pace set by freshman phenom German Fernandez of Oklahoma State sapped any kick McNamara might have had. He wound up a non-scoring 11th, while Fernandez won impressively from the front in a lifetime-best 3:39.00. Alas, a great race between the teenagers Fernandez and Centrowitz was lost, and with it the Ducks’ final hopes.
Other familiar faces who won championships the final day included Charles Clark of Florida State and Porscha Lucas of A&M in the 200s, Kimberly Williams of FSU in the triple jump and Ronnie Ash of Bethune-Cookman in the men’s highs. All have won New Balance titles at the Armory over the last two seasons.
For Bethune-Cookman, it was the Florida school’s first-ever outdoor NCAA Division I champion in any sport.
In the women’s discus on Saturday, D’Andra Carter of Texas Tech finished 1st and made the Carter family what is believed to be the first to have three different family members win NCAA track championships. D’Andra’s older sister, Michelle, won a shot put title indoors for Texas, and their father, Michael, won several shot put titles for SMU before winning a Super Bowl as a member of the 49ers. There is another sibling, Michael Carter Jr., who currently puts the shot in junior college in Texas.
(The Mondschein family is close to this rare achievement. Irv Mondschein won the NCAA high jump twice for NYU in the 1940s, and his grandson Brian won the pole vault for Virginia Tech. One of Irv’s sons, also named Brian, was an occasional member of the Washington mile-relay team in 1975. Washington won the NCAA mile relay that year, but Mondschein was only an alternate for that meet.)
As another college season drew to a close, the Aggies celebrated on Arkansas’s new home field, while the Oregon Ducks’ clutch of fans, led by Phil Knight, the Nike cofounder, sat disconsolate, awaiting a long trip home with just 2nd-place ribbons to hold.
In 2010, however, Oregon will be the home team for this meet, in Eugene. The last time Oregon won the men’s team championship was in 1984 – in Eugene – and the first time they won the title was in 1962 – in Eugene. They also won in 1964, again in Eugene. Those last two teams were coached by the late Bill Bowerman, Nike’s other cofounder and Knight’s coach when he was a journeyman runner for the Ducks.
No decision has been made about the future sites or even qualifying procedures for these championships, conducted now since 1921. There is talk of another three- or four-site rotation, similar to this latest journey through Drake, Arkansas and Oregon. Because of the contentious weather in the South and Midwest this time of year, some coaches are also calling for a return to the comfortable weather of California. The meet was held in Sacramento for the three years prior to this cycle.
As to qualifying, the current four-region system is set to change to a bewildering two-region setup in 2010. No one is sure even how such vast meets would be conducted, or where, and financial pressures also may contribute to their complete elimination. That could mean a return to the previous system of qualifying only from a season-long performance list. There are points of argument on all sides.
But once the meet itself is underway, such details seem trivial. This remains a great, vast event that includes athletes from every corner of the country and of every stripe. On Saturday a young man who left his Arizona high school midyear to enroll at the University of Oklahoma won an NCAA championship (Will Claye in the triple jump) a few months after setting foot on campus; a 25-year-old Croatian, Martin Maric, who left the University of Georgia and enrolled at Cal, won the discus on his final throw, by 1 inch; Jonathan Borlee won the 400 for Florida State 10 months after running in the Olympic 4x4 final for Belgium, and such runners as Laura Hermanson and Brenda Martinez, from the little-known campuses of North Dakota State and Cal-Riverside, won silver medals.