Tribe Athletes Compete at the NCAA East Regional

05/26/06 9:58PM

GREENSBORO, NC - Athletes from the 110 schools in the East Region for track converged on North Carolina A&T State University today to compete for a trip to the NCAA Championships in Sacramento. At the time of writing, the women’s high jump, 5,00m run, and men’s 5,000m run had not been completed. All three event had athletes from William and Mary competing.

In the day’s first event, the women’s javelin, junior Brenna Blevins (Pulaski, VA) threw for 135’9” to place 17th. While this has ended her season in the javelin as a stand-alone event, Blevins is provisionally qualified to the NCAA Championships in the heptathlon, with her ECAC-winning score of 5,229 ranking her 31st in the nation. She will hear whether or not she has been invited to compete for the national title by the middle of next week.

On the track, senior Jeff Hedley (Virginia Beach, VA) competed in the preliminaries of the men’s 1,500m. His time of 3:51.42 ranked him 15th overall, only two seconds behind the last spot in tomorrow’s final. Hedley was the Colonial Athletic Association champion at 1,500m this season, and set his personal record in the event two weeks ago at the IC4A Championships, running 3:48.32 in the preliminaries there.

Also completing her collegiate career in today’s preliminaries was senior Lydia Malley (Arlington, VA), who ran 2:15.19 in the 800m dash to finish a dream season. She won the 800m at the CAA Championships one month ago with a personal record 2:12.11, and earned a pair of All-East honors at the ECAC Championships two weeks later by finishing sixth in the 800m and running the second leg of the 4x800m relay that took second.

The NCAA East Regional continues tomorrow. The top five individual finishers in each event gain an automatic bid to the NCAA Championships in Sacramento, California, and a limited number of at-large bids will be given out based on season-best results of all other athletes.