Bonnie Meekins Selected for NCAA Championships

Senior Heptathlete to Make First Appearance at National Meet

06/01/07 10:45AM

SACRAMENTO, CALIF - William and Mary senior Bonnie Meekins (Herndon, Va.) will become the first Tribe women to compete at the NCAA Championships since 2003, it was announced this week by the NCAA. Meekins is ranked 19th in the nation in the heptathlon, and will be competing June 7-8 in Sacramento, California.

Meekins, the 2007 CAA and ECAC champion in the heptathlon, qualified for the national meet after posting a school-record score of 5,457 points in winning the ECAC title. She rode lifetime-best performances in each of the last four events to the win, and is the first Tribe female athlete since three-time All-American Ali Henderson ’04 and Cheryl Bauer ’03 went in 2003.

Meekins has set four school records in her final season for the Green and Gold, and provisionally qualified for both the indoor and outdoor NCAA Championships. In December, she scored 3,757 points in the pentathlon to take the school record in that event, and qualify for NCAAs. She also provisionally qualified in the indoor high jump, after leaping 5’ 10” at Virginia Tech, the second-best height in school history.

Meekins set the school’s indoor long-jump record (tied for the best mark indoor or outdoor) when she achieved a distance of 18’ 7.75” at Virginia Tech, and later surpassed that with a jump of 18’ 11.25” in the ECAC heptathlon. At the NCAA East Regional, she took ninth in the high jump. In addition to qualifying her for the NCAA Championships, Meekins’ heptathlon mark of 5,457 provisionally qualifies her for the USAT&F National Championships later this month.

The heptathlon championship will be contested over two days, June 7-8. The first four events, the 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, and 200m dash will begin at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time on June 7, and the final three events, the long jump, javelin, and 800m run, will take place begin at 11:30 a.m. on June 8. The final two days of the Championships, which run from June 6-9, will be broadcast live on television. The broadcasts, which will also feature highlights from the first two days, will air from 8:30-11:30 p.m. on CSTV on Friday, June 8; and from 1-3 p.m. on CBS on Saturday, June 9.