May 13, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif. - The Arizona State University women's track and field team successfully defended its championship crown, scoring 158 points to secure back-to-back titles as the 2007 Pac-10 Conference Track & Field Championships came to a close Sunday afternoon on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif. The Sun Devil men came close to making a clean sweep, but fell just three points shy of Oregon in the race, falling 114 to 111 in the standings.
The women captured their second title in a row, scoring 158 points and outdistancing themselves from the host Cardinal by 23.63 points (134.333). The 2007 title come more comfortably than one year ago when they won by just 2.5 points over Stanford. UCLA (118.5), USC (113) and Washington State (67.833) rounded out the Top 5 teams in the meet. The men, who finished three points out of first place, took second by one point as USC scored 110 for third place. UCLA (92) and Arizona (91) rounded out the Top 5.
ASU's women came out firing and took care of the business at hand, scoring 83 points on the day to take the crown with Latosha Wallace playing a huge roll in the point total as she accounted for 18 points individually and helped a relay capture another 10 points. Wallace opened the day by winning the 400m dash by out-leaning Nicole Leach of UCLA at the finish line in a personal-best time of 51.97, the fourth-fastest time in school history. Wallace followed that performance up with runner-up honors in the 400m hurdles (57.55) before anchoring the 4x400m relay of Bridgette Williams, Shauntel Elcock and Jordan Durham to the eighth-fastest time in school history of 3:33.14 to take the race.
For the second year in a row, the women's 5,000m run proved to be a key factor in the team win as three women combined to score 15 points in the race as Amy Hastings finished second (16:26.42), Ali Kielty (16:39.38) in fourth and Jenna Kingma (16:55.54) in seventh. Wallace and Williams (54.44) in sixth place combined to score 13 points in the 400m dash while 12 points came from the hammer throw as Sarah Stevens place third (64.97m), Jessica Pressley (60.93m) took fifth and Tai Battle (56.82m) took seventh in the event.
A nice surprise for the women came in the pole vault as April Kubishta (4.10m) took second place and Alana Waterford (3.80m) took sixth with the fourth-best mark in school history. Also in the history books for the women was Kari Hardt, who moved up to ninth on the 1,500m list with a time of 4:24.62 to place sixth overall.
On the men's side, the javelin duo of Andrew Smith and Brad Roth finished second and third overall, respectively, to score 14 points. Smith recorded a toss of 70.59m to move into third on the all-time ASU lists while becoming just the fourth Sun Devil to record a toss of 70m or better. Roth was one centimeter from joining the group as he recorded the fifth-best mark in school history at 69.99m.
Kelvin Love also made a big impact for the men as he did his part to make up for the absence of Domenik Peterson, who was sidelined by an injury. Love took runner-up honors in both the 100m dash (10.40) and 200m dash (20.79) to score 16 points for the men before running the third leg of the third-place 4x400m relay of Justin Kremer, Marquis Profit and Jimmie Gordon (3:09.27).
Aaron Aguayo, the conference's only four-time steeplechase champion, doubled back in the 5,000m run and finished third overall in 14:06.00 while Kyle Alcorn took sixth (14:16.15) after placing third in the steeplechase one day earlier.
Several members of the team will head to Tucson next weekend to compete in the Tucson Elite Classic one before the NCAA West Region Championships take place in Eugene, Ore.