EUGENE — A peerless performance by Anna Hall led Florida to the women’s team title Saturday at Hayward Field in the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships.
Hall won the heptathlon with 6,385 points, falling just short of the collegiate record.
If that wasn’t enough, she placed second in the open 400 hurdles, wedging the race between between the heptathlon’s javelin and 800-meter events, the final two of the seven-event competition.
In all, she gave the Gators an 18-point boost to their winning total of 74 points. Pre-meet favorite Texas was second with 64.
It was a good show on a rainy afternoon before 9,162.
EUGENE, OR – JUNE 11: Anna Hall of the Florida Gators celebrates after the 800 meter of the womens heptathlon during the Division I Men’s and Women’s Outdoor Track & Field Championships held at Hayward Field on June 11, 2022 in Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)NCAA Photos via Getty Images
The Oregon Ducks, a traditional college track and field power, weren’t in the conversation.
The Oregon women finished 11th with 20 points. The UO men were also rans too. They scored 11 points and tied for 25th in the men’s competition, which ended Friday.
The last time the Ducks finished outside the top 10 in both the men’s and women’s team competition at an NCAA meet was 2006.
There has been speculation about the job status of UO coach Robert Johnson. A reporter for Runner’s World asked him to respond to a thread on an internet message board about his future as coach on Tuesday during the pre-meet news conference.
Johnson deflected, saying he hadn’t seen the speculation. When she followed up to ask if there was any truth to the speculation, he again said he hadn’t seen it.
Johnson did not come through the interview area Saturday following the meet. He did a phone interview with a reporter from the Register-Guard. He agreed to do a phone interview with The Oregonian, but did not.
The university did release comments from Johnson in which he lauded the way his women’s team competed.
“It was a disappointing weekend for our men, definitely a tough way to end the season,” Johnson said. “But it’s something we’ll look at, and always look at, win or lose, as we evaluate the year.”
The Ducks had some good moments on Saturday. The 4×100 relay of Jadyn Mays, Kemba Nelson, Jasmin Reed and Jasmine Montgomery finished third in a season’s best time of 42.59. Texas won in 42.42.
Less than an hour later Nelson battled Julien Alfred of Texas to the finish line of the 100. Alfred won, but it took a photograph to separate the two, both timed in 11.02. Officially, Alfred’s margin of victory was .005 of a second.
“I knew it was close,” Nelson said. “I knew I was there.”
Unfortunately, so was Alfred.
“I felt like I reached for the line,” Nelson said. “Maybe that’s where I lost — the lean. The fight going to the line is a good feeling. Just the timing of the lean could have been better.”
Hall, meanwhile, was the star of the meet. She had to talk Florida coach Mike Holloway into adding the 400 hurdles to her workload.
Already the 2022 USA Track & Field heptathlon champion, she was a prohibitive favorite here, with a real shot at the meet’s heptathlon meet record of 6,527 set by Diane Guthrie that has stood since 1995.
The grueling 400 hurdles added another level of difficulty to the task.
“I knew it was going to be really, really hard,” Hall said.
Britton Wilson of Arkansas won the 400 hurdles in 53.86 seconds. Hall came across in 54.76.
She had less than 15 minutes between the end of the hurdles race and the start of the heptathlon 800.
When the 800 started, Hall said she still was out of breath. Fighting through weary legs on the first lap, she forgot about the heptathlon record and concentrated on finishing the race.
When she crossed in 2:21.23, she collapsed on her back, and lay on the track long enough a trainer came out to check. Eventually, she got to her feet.
“It was brutal,” Hall said.
Courtney Wayment of BYU ran away with the 3,000-meter steeplechase. She won by more than nine seconds in 9:16.00, destroying the meet record of 9:24.41 held by Courtney Frerichs of New Mexico since 2016.
In her wake, Kaylee Mitchell and Grace Fetherstonhaugh of Oregon State finished sixth and 10th respectively.
Mitchell’s sixth-place finish in 9:34.59 broke her own school record of 9:41.51 set in the prelims, and earned OSU three team points.
Those are the first points the Beavers have scored in an NCAA meet since 1986, when Connie Peterka placed sixth in the javelin.
Here are the results from the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships.
— Ken Goe for The Oregonian/OregonLive
KenGoe1020@gmail.com | Twitter: @KenGoe
