Winslow graduate John Purvis, a freshman at Morgan State, popped a personal-best 55-7 and placed 2nd in the shot put Wednesday at the MEAC Championships in Virginia Beach.
Purvis finished second to another Morgan state freshman, Zackery Dillon, who threw a PR of his own at 56-0 for the win.
Going into the final round, Dillon, a graduate of Calabar High School in Kingston, Jamaica, led with a best throw of 54-6 1/2, and Purvis was sitting in 2nd at 53-11. Purvis then took the lead with his 55-7, only to watch Dillon reclaim the lead on the final attempt of the competition with his 56-footer.
Before the conference meet, Purvis had an indoor PR of 53-6 1/2 with the 16-pound shot. He threw 54-2 3 3/4 to win the MEAC Outdoor Championship last spring at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro.
Purvis also placed 4th in the 35-pound wight throw with a PR of 49-10. His previous PR was 46-4 in Virginia Beach earlier this month.
Morgan State’s athletics web site lists no indoor school records or top-10 lists or any sort of historical information or pretty much anything at all, but going through year-by-year MEAC performances lists on TFRRS [Track and Field Results Reporting System] I did figure out that Dillon and Purvis registered the two-best throws by Morgan State shot putters in 12 years – since Tyron Benjamin of the Commonwealth of Dominica threw 60-5 as a Morgan State senior at a meet at the Armory in 2010.
So back-to-back Purvis and Dillon recorded the best shot put throws by Morgan State freshmen since at least 2009. The TFRRS database only goes back to 2010.
Purvis threw 143-7 in the discus last spring and 133-10 in the hammer. At Winslow, Purvis threw 60-0 indoors with the 12-pound shot, No. 9 in South Jersey indoor track history, and also threw 168-9 in the discus.
From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank 