USC sends eleven athletes to NCAA tournament

Eleven members of the USC track & field team will compete in 14 individual events at the 2014 NCAA Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon between June 11-14 after qualifying at the NCAA West Regional this past weekend at the University of Arkansas. Additionally, three relay teams will race on Hayward Field at the University of Oregon during the national championship.

On the men’s team, senior Aaron Brown qualified in both the 100 meter and 200 meter; redshirt senior Aleec Harris qualified in the 110 meter hurdles; junior BeeJay Lee qualified in the 100 meter and senior Viktor Fajoyomi qualified in the decathalon. On the women’s team, junior Alexandra Collatz qualified in the discus; junior Melia Cox qualified in both the triple jump and 100 meter hurdles; senior Jessica Davis qualified in the 100 meter; redshirt sophomore Tynia Gaither qualified in both the 100 meter and 200 meter; freshman Amalie Iuel qualified in the 400 meter hurdles; junior Vanessa Jones qualified in the 400 meter and senior Oluwakemi Olonade qualified in the triple jump.

In the relay races, both the men’s and women’s 4×100 meter relay as well as the women’s 4×400 relay team qualified. The men’s 4×100 team consists of Brown, Harris, Lee and redshirt senior Terrence Abram; the women’s 4×100 team is made up of Gaither, Davis, senior Loudia Laarman and sophomore Alexis Faulknor and Davis, Jones, junior Akawkaw Ndipagbor and senior Ashley Liverpool represented the 4×400 team.

A total of 16 athletes will don cardinal and gold at the national championship.

Harris set the Pac-12 record for fastest time in the men’s 110 meter hurdles with a time of 13.18 to win the event. Harris’s time broke a 36-year-old conference record. Greg Foster of UCLA set the previous record with a time of 13.22 in 1978. The time was a personal record for Harris and improved the school record of 13.32 that he had previously set. The time was also the fastest ran by any man in the country and second fastest in the world this year.

Brown ran the fifth fastest time in the world this year in the 200 meter with a time of 20.16. A native of Toronto, Canada, Brown broke the Canadian national record that was set in 1991. Brown also ran a 10.12 to qualify in the 100 meter. Lee ran a 10.16 to qualify in the 100 meter. Lee finished in fifth place in the event, five hundredths of a second behind the winner. Brown finished in second place. Fajoyomi is the 15th of 24 seeds nationally in the men’s decathlon after scoring 7,489 points in regionals.

Collatz qualified in the discus with a toss of 54.06 meters, finishing in fifth. Cox was the 12th and final runner to qualify in the 100 meter hurdles with a time of 13.44. She also finished in 11th place in the triple jump with a distance of 12.69 meters. Davis finished ninth in the 100 meter at 11.52. While Gaither’s time of 11.63 trailed Davis’s, Gaither’s heat ran against a sizeable headwind, and Gaither’s wind-adjusted time was good enough for ninth place. Gaither’s time of 22.88 placed her fifth in the 200 meter. Iuel’s 58.10 in the 400 meter hurdles placed her 12th in the event. Jones placed fourth in the 400 meter with her time of 52.15. Olonade also placed ninth in the triple jump with her leap of 12.72 meters.

The men’s 4×100 meter relay team finished in ninth place with a time of 39.59. The women’s 4×100 meter relay team ran a 43.55 to finish in third place. The women’s 4×400 meter relay team placed fifth with at 3:31.94.

The team is led by Caryl Smith Gilbert, who was named director of track and field last June following the retirement of Ron Allice. Allice led the Trojans to 32 individual national championships during his 19-year tenure as the program’s head coach and also coached the women’s team national championship in 2001. Smith Gilbert was a former All-American sprinter at UCLA and was the head coach of the University of Central Florida’s women’s track and cross country teams before joining USC.