In her first U.S. Championships, Pennsville’s Arianna Smith ran her 2nd-fastest time ever and advanced to the final of the 400-meter hurdles Saturday at the U.S. Championships.
Smith – racing out of challenging Lane 8 – ran 56.50 and placed 4th in the 2nd of three semifinal races. The top two finishes in each race and the next three-fastest advanced to the final. Smith’s race produced two of the three-fastest “Small q” performances, and she advanced by 2-100ths of a second.
Smith ran her PR of 56.11 in Norfolk in May when she won the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference title as a senior at Howard. She is ranked 21st in the U.S. but one of nine finalists at the national championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore.
Three South Jersey women are among the top-21 intermediate hurdles in the U.S. Paul VI graduate Aliya Garozzo is 15th with her 55.77 in Durham, N.C., in April, and Natalie Dumas, a rising senior at Eastern, is 19th at 55.99. Garozzo ran 57.49 and did not qualify. She finished strong, moving up from 6thto 3rd after the final hurdle but fell just short. Dumas only ran the 800 at Nationals.
Smith is the first South Jersey woman to make the 400-meter hurdles final at U.S. Nationals since Rancocas Valley’s Tonya Lee placed 8th in 1991 and 7th in both 1995 and 1996.
The final is scheduled for 4:34 p.m. Sunday, and Smith will be in difficult far-inside Lane 1 as the final qualifier.
From the Backstretch by Reuben Frank 