From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank

What a huge weekend for Eastern graduate Jailya Ash, a freshman at UConn.

Ash PR’d in the 100-meter hurdles and placed second at the Big East Championships in Storrs and also anchored the Huskies’ 2nd-place 400-meter relay team.

Ash ran 13.58 in the hurdles final, finishing second to Villanova sophomore Jane Livingson, who ran 13.47. Ash’s PR coming into the meet was a 13.64 at Navy just three weeks ago. She ran 13.65 in the prelims before her big race in the final.

Her time is fastest by a UConn hurdler in 12 years and it ranks 13th among all NCAA Division 1 freshmen hurdlers.

I would love to tell you where Ash’s 13.58 ranks in Connecticut history, but the UConn web site is one of the few Division 1 sites that doesn’t provide all-time top-10 lists. There is a 2015 media guide – that’s the most recent one on the site – but, alas, it doesn’t have any all-time performance lists. I can’t even find school records on the site. Disappointing.

But I can tell you after going through all the recent UConn pages on the Track and Field Results Reporting System that her 13.58 is fastest by a UConn hurdler since Madalayne Smith ran 13.47 at the 2012 Big East Championships in Tampa. But her mark was wind-aided (2.9 meters-per-second).

The last faster wind-legal mark by a UConn hurdler is a 13.39 by Phylicia George at the 2010 Big East meet in Cincinnati. There is a 2012 media guide buried deep within UConn’s web site and it lists that mark as the school record. Since we’ve determined nobody’s run faster since, that has to remain the school record, although that’s a apparently a deep dark secret in Storrs. That doesn’t mean Ash’s 13.58 is necessarily No. 2 in school history because there could have been marks between 13.39 and 13.58 before 2010, which is as far back as TFRRS goes.

But it is a heck of a performance by Ash, whose high school PR was a 14.02 from just this past June when she won the Meet of Champions in South Plainfield. She doubled the 55 and hurdles at the indoor M-of-C last year at Ocean Breeze.

Ash’s older sister Jewel is a sophomore at Charleston Southern and is ranked 19 among U.S. women in the 400 hurdles at 57.16.