Riding a strong final day of competition, the NMHU women’s track team placed third at the 2010 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Indoor Championships in Golden, Colorado. This marks the highest finish ever for the Cowgirls in the RMAC championship meet. The NMHU women finished 6th in the 2009 standings.
Highlands’
Angella Graham led the way for the Cowgirl squad with one of the most impressive performances in RMAC history. A two-time All-American in 2009, Graham won all four of her individual field events at the RMAC meet and placed second in the 60M hurdles. More impressively, Graham moved into the top ten nationally in all five events with her single meet performance.
On Friday, Graham opened the meet by breaking her own RMAC record in the Pentathlon. five events contested in one morning session. Graham scored 3,680 points to smash her 2009 mark of 3,521 and moves into fifth place in the national rankings in the Pentathlon.
Friday saw two more school records in final events when
Carolina Garcia raced to fifth place in the 5000 meter run in a school best 18:07.5 (altitude adjusted) and become the first HU distance runner to earn All-Conference honors at the indoor meet. Garcia would come back later on Friday to anchor the HU Distance Medley team to yet another school-record run of 12:57.7. That team included
Brieanna Roper, Arianna Andreatta and Ashley Lovato.
Saturday found the Cowgirls in a tight team battle with host, Colorado School of Mines and Western State for third place. As Graham continued to dominate her competitors, taking only one attempt each in the Long Jump (19-1 ¼”; #10 nationally) and Triple Jump (40’ 7 ¾”; # 3 nationally) to win both, the rest of the team stepped up as well.
Candace St. Louis proved once again to be a performer when it really counts. The senior had gone into the 2009 Outdoor meet as an unknown and upset the competition with All-Conference finishes in both the 100 and 200 meter dashes. On Saturday, St. Louis again rattled the rankings with a third-place finish in the 60-meter dash in a national provisional qualifying time of 7.75 seconds. She came back to tie for second in the 200-meter dash with national sprint qualifier Kiera Benson of CSM. St. Louis finished her day with an anchor leg on the fifth-place 4 x 400 team along with Andreatta, Sessyon Crawford and Sherryann Baggoo.
Baggoo, meanwhile, may have provided the upset of the meet with an inspirational finish in the 400-meter dash. Coming into the meet ranked #14 on the RMAC 400-meter list, Baggoo squeaked into the final with a seventh-place preliminary time. The senior then ran the race of her season to grab fourth place in the final and secure five critical team points.
Cowgirl sprinter Qiauna Fair set two personal bests on her way to a seventh place finish in the 60-meter dash. After running 7.94 seconds in the prelims, Fair improved to 7.90 seconds in the final and missed All-Conference honors by less than one-hundredth of a second.
Senior Ebonee Carter ended her indoor career with a school-record in the shot put. Carter was not ranked among the conference leaders in the event going into the meet, but threw an all-time NMHU best of 12.18M (39’ -11 ½”) to earn a spot in the event final. Carter was sitting in the eighth and final scoring position before being pushed back to ninth by less than 4 inches in the final round.
Also scoring an impressive personal best at the meet was Reyna Montano. The senior ran an altitude adjusted 18:52.3 in the 5000 meter run, beating her season best by over one-minute and marking the first time she has broken the 19-minute mark as a Cowgirl. Montano placed 10th in the event.
Graham will now compete at the NCAA DII Indoor National Championships in Albuquerque, NM on March 12-13. The competition begins Friday at 3PM at the Albuquerque Convention Center.
The Cowgirls will begin their Outdoor Season March 27th at the Texas Tech Open.
GO COWGIRLS!