Pitman graduate Emily Galvin, a senior at Rowan, recorded one of the top hammer throws in NCAA Division 3 history Saturday and placed 2nd at the NCAA Championships at St. John Fisher in Rochester, N.Y.

Galvin threw 177-6 on her 1st attempt before popping a 184-3 on her 2nd, not far off her lifetime best of 186-9, which she just threw a week and a half ago in Selinsgrove, Pa.

On her 3rd throw, Galvin put it all together and surpassed the 190-foot barrier for the first time, moving from 4th into 2nd at 190-10.

That puts her at No. 22 in NCAA Division 3 history.

Alexis Boykin, a sophomore at MIT in Cambridge, threw 195-5 on her 2nd attempt to win the competition. That’s No. 9 in NCAA Division 3 history.

In the finals, neither Boykin nor Galvin improved on their throws in the first round. They were the only competitors who surpassed 190 feet. Galvin did add a 187-6 on her 5th attempt – her 2nd-best throw ever.

Galvin’s 2nd-place finish is highest by a Rowan woman at Division 3 nationals since Kathy Darling from Milford, Del., won her 2nd consecutive discus title in 2001 in Decatur, Ill.

Galvin is the first Rowan woman ever to earn All-America honors in the hammer and the first in any of the throws since Cherokee’s Melissa Lake placed 8th in the javelin with a throw of 137-6 at the 2013 meet in La Crosse, Wisc.

Galvin spent her first four years and three seasons at Villanova, where she threw 185-3 and placed 3rd in last year’s Big East Championships at Storrs, Conn.

The other outstanding senior javelin thrower from Gloucester County named Emily – Kingsway graduate Emily Hilt of Rutgers-Camden – placed 17th with a 165-3 on her final attempt after fouling on her first two throws. It was Hilt who edged Galvin to win the NJAC title earlier this month in Mahwah.

Amara Conte ran Rowan’s fastest 400 in 33 years Friday and advanced to the finals at the NCAA Division 3 Championships.

Conte, a sophomore, ran a personal-best 46.76 at St. John Fisher in Rochester, N.Y,., the fastest time by a Rowan quarter-miler since Salem High graduate Maurice Ransome ran 46.19 in 1990.

Conte’s previous PR was a 46.79 when he won the NJAC title earlier this month at Ramapo. That 46.76 is 4th-fastest ever by a NJAC 400 runner. Dwayne Stevens of Elizabeth High ran 45.90 for Montclair State in 1992, Ramapo’s Cheickna Trarore from Snyder ran 46.54 when he placed 2nd at NCAAs last year in Geneva, Ohio, and there’s Ransome’s 46.19.

Interestingly, both Traore and Conte are from Jersey City, Traore from Snyder and Conte from Ferris a couple miles to the northeast.

On Friday, all eight qualifiers for Saturday’s final ran under 47 seconds, which is unprecedented. The final will include No. 7, No. 11, No. 16, No. 20, No. 21 and No. 22 in NCAA Division 3 history. The final is scheduled for 2:10 p.m. Saturday, and Conte will be out in Lane 8.

Rowan’s last outdoor All-America in the 400 was Rich Dixon, who placed 4th in 2000 in 47.82 at North Central College in Naperville, Ill. Dixon was also 4th in 1999 in 47.77.

(A note on that 46.19 – I can’t find any record of it actually happening. Even the NCAA Division 3 track official stats don’t indicate where it happened, although they do list the time: . I’ve searched everywhere using every possible resource – mainly Newspapers.com – and if it happened nobody knew about it or wrote about it. If Maurice Ransome is out there, let us know where you ran 46.19!)

Thanks to former Rowan runner Dan Fourney, who asked a bunch of teammates from that 1990 team if they remembered where Maurice ran his 46.19. Someone tagged Maurice himself, and he said it was actually in the semifinals at 1990 nationals, which were also at North Central College in Naperville. The only full set of results from that meet that I could find don’t show the semis, which is how we missed it!

St. Augustine’s Sincere Rhea punched his ticket to Austin in the 110-meter hurdles Friday evening with a commanding win in the 2nd of three quarterfinal races at the NCAA Championships East Preliminaries.

Rhea, a Miami junior, easily won his heat at Hodges Stadium in Jacksonville in 13.56 with a 2.7-meters-per-second assisting tailwind, finishing well clear of 2nd-place Tayshaun Chisholm of Delaware State, who was 2nd in 13.66.

The first three finishers in each of the three races along with the next-three-fastest times advance to the NCAA Championships in Austin June 7-10. The top 12 hurdlers from the NCAA Western Prelims in Sacramento later Friday will race in the semifinals at 7:32 p.m. Wednesday, June 7.

Rhea’s 13.56 is his 2nd-fastest ever under any conditions. He ran 13.48 with legal 1.2 wind in the trials of the ACC Championships two weeks ago in Raleigh.

Rhea ran 13.70 Wednesday in the first round and was only the 20th-fastest qualifier out of 24 into Friday’s quarterfinals. But he was 5th-fastest of those 24 hurdlers on Friday, and the four who ran faster were all aided by a 5.8 meters-per-second wind. Any race assisted by a tailwind over 2.0 meters per second is considered wind-aided and those times are not eligible for record purposes.

But that’s irrelevent here because all that matters is surviving to the next round, and Rhea had never done that before outdoors. He placed 30th in the 2021 prelims, also in Hodges Stadium, and that was his final race competing for Penn State. He placed 35th in last year’s prelims. His best NCAA finish was 14th place at the 2021 indoor championships over the 60-meter hurdles in Fayetteville.

But he’s clearly a much better, much more consistent, much more confident hurdler these days, and it’s showed over the last two months with a series of very fast races against very strong fields.

Rhea, who turned 22 last month, is now ranked 35th in the world and 12th among U.S. men, 2-100ths of a second behind Eagles wide receiver Devon Allen, who ran 13.46 at the Penn Relays.

Rowan freshman Kwaku Nkrumah leads all qualifiers into the final of the 110-meter hurdles at the NCAA Division 3 Championships.

Nkrumah, whose PR at Teaneck over the 39-inch hurdles was 14.44, ran 14.25 over the 42-inch barriers Friday at St. John Fisher in Rochester, N.Y.

Nkrumah didn’t break 15 seconds over the college hurdles until last month but gradually lowered his PR from 14.75 in early April at a home meet, 14.60 in mid-April at Princeton, 14.46 in late April in Columbia, S.C., and then the big breakthrough was a 14.25 to win the NJAC Championships at Ramapo earlier this month.

He ran 14.30 two weeks ago to win the AARTFC Championships in Selinsgrove, Pa., so he’s now run 14.25, 14.30 and 14.25 in his last three meets after not breaking 15 seconds until last month.

Nkrumah was first across the line in the 3rd of three heats of the 110-meter highs Friday, edging Enoch Ellis of MIT of Cambridge, Mass., by 1-100th of a second. The winner of each heat plus the next-five-fastest hurdlers advanced to the final.

Nkrumah, Ellis and MIT’s Kenneith Wei – who won the 3rd heat in 14.33 – were the only hurdlers under 14.40 in the trials.

The final is scheduled for 1:50 p.m. Saturday.

Rowan’s web site lists Garry Moore’s 13.40 from 1982 as the school record, but I think we’re all aware that’s not an accurate time. Maybe a hand time. The USTFCCCA web site confirms that Moore’s 13.90 is the actual fastest wind-legal FAT time by a Rowan hurdler.

I made an attempt to put together an all-time Glassboro State / Rowan 110-meter hurdles wind-legal performance list, and it looks like Nkrumah’s 14.25 is 6th-fastest in school history, although I could be missing one or two names. Rowan does not have an all-time top-10 on its web site, unfortunately. This is what I cobbled together:

13.90 … Garry Moore [Overbrook], 1982
14.01 … Stanley Moore [Overbrook], 1983
14.22 … Leon Devero [Linden], 1981
14.23 … Dave Benjamin [Freehold Twp.], 2017
14.24 … Bobby Cooks [McArthur, Hollywood, Fla.], 2018
14.25 … Kwaku Nkrumah [Teaneck], 2023
14.27 … Chase Tolliver [], 2017
14.28 … Tyler Garland [Deptford], 2019

14.00w… Dave Benjamin [Freehold Twp.], 2017
14.05w … Bobby Cooks [McArthur, Hollywood, Fla.], 2018

The Rowan women, with four South Jersey legs, ran their fastest 4-by-4 in five years and just missed advancing to the final at the NCAA Division 3 Championships.

Senior Amantha Sosa Caceres from Absegami, sophomore Jasmine Broadway of Burlington Township, sophomore Molly Lodge of Woodstown and sophomore Nevaeh Lorjuste from Triton ran 3:49.43 and placed 9th in the prelims at St. John Fisher University in Rochester, N.Y. The top eight advanced to Saturday’s final.

Lorjuste anchored in 54.97. She races in the open 400 later Friday.

It was Rowan’s fastest time this year and the program’s fastest time since the 2018 team ran 3:48.28 at a meet at Swarthmore. Dominique Peters from Lawrenceville, Jackie Ansong of Bordentown, Brianna Angelella from Manahawkin and Miyah Sturdivant of Timber Creek ran on that team.

Rowan’s previous season-best performance was a 3:50.31 at the NJAC Championships in Mahwah with the same four runners and Pederson leading off (but Lodge running 2nd, Lorjuste 3rd and Broadway anchor).

Rowan is 16th all-time in NCAA Division 3 with its 3:44.60 to place 4th at the 2014 NCAA Division 3 Championships at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, the geographic epicenter of the state.

Cherokee’s Jessalyn Wright, South Brunswick’s Jamie Thompson, Hillside’s Tashay Wilson and Edison’s Melirah Searcy ran on that team.

The cutoff for advancing was 3:47.85. The College of New Jersey got in as the No. 8 seed for the final.

Sometimes I miss one, and I sure missed one this time.

When we last wrote about Fatimah Owens, she was teaming up with Bryanna Craig to help Millville win the 2019 South Jersey Group 4 championship at Washington Township. You can read that story here.

We lost track of Owens after she graduated from Millville in the spring of 2019, but she went to Towson University in Maryland, where she’s now a junior and one of the top throwers in the country.

On Saturday, Owens will throw the discus at the NCAA Championships Eastern Preliminaries at Hodges Stadium on the North Florida campus in Jacksonville. It will be Owens’ first NCAA meet and she’ll be competing at the same time as Craig, now a freshman at Purdue and one of the top Under-20 heptathletes in the world, will be high jumping.

Owens was a solid thrower at Millville, but it’s definitely been a steady climb to where she is now.

She didn’t surpass 35 feet until her junior year and didn’t even start throwing the discus until her senior year. She had high school PRs of 40-3 ½ from her win at South Jersey Group 4 sectionals and 122-10 from the Meet of Champions a few weeks later at Northern Burlington.

Owens started showing promise quickly as a freshman at Towson, improving to 134-1 in the discus the second time she threw in college and hitting 140-1 by the end of the season while PR’ing at 40-11 in the shot.

By last spring, she was at 42-8 ¼ and 157-10 and this past indoor season she made a dramatic improvement in the shot, throwing 46 feet in back-to-back meets.

She popped two huge PRs two weeks ago at ECACs at George Mason in Fairfax, Va., winning the discus with a 166-5 and taking 5th in the shot at 47-10.

Owens now ranks 2nd in Towson history in school history in the discus, just five inches behind only Phontavia Sawyer, who threw 166-10 at the 2019 Penn Relays. She’s also No. 5 in school history in the shot.

Owens throws at 1 p.m. Saturday in Jacksonville.

Iowa sophomore Nylah Perry from Winslow Township overcame challenging Lane 2 and advanced in the 400-meter hurdles Thursday night at the NCAA West Preliminaries in Sacramento.

Perry ran 59.20 and advanced as the 4th-fastest hurdler out of six preliminary races who didn’t finish in the top three in her race.

Next for Perry is the quarterfinals at 7:25 p.m. on Saturday back at Sacramento State’s Hornet Stadium.

Perry PR’d at 58.61 last month in Gainesville after running 59.67 as a Hawkeye freshman. That ranks her 9th in Iowa history with two years to go.

Click to access 24880bad-2022-23-cc-track-guide.pdf

Saturday’s race is a national quarterfinal. The top three finishers in each of three heats as well as the next three-fastest advance to the NCAA Championships in Austin July 7-10.

Matt Iuvara is new to track. He’s even newer to the intermediate hurdles.

Yet Iuvara ran 55.05 Thursday night at the Cherokee Final Countdown Last Chance Meet in just his 5th lifetime 400-meter hurdles race.

Iuvara, a Haddon Heights senior, didn’t run track until he was a junior, but he had success almost instantly. In his 3rd lifetime 800, he ran 1:59.20 and placed 2nd in the state Group 2 meet at the Bubble in February 2022. He lowered his 800 time to 1:58.93 last spring, his first year of outdoor track, and although he’s PR’d in the 400 and 800 this spring – he ran 49.96 at South Jersey Elite and 1:57.87 at Haddonfield Distance Night – he’s progress in the 400IH has been crazy.

Iuvara ran his first couple intermediate hurdles races in dual meets – 56.84 vs. Haddonfield and then 55.54 vs. Sterling. But his first major race wasn’t until the Camden County Championships two weeks ago, where he ran 56.21 and won. He PR’d at 55.57 winning the Haddonfield Invitational last week before going 55.05 Thursday at Cherokee.

He took 2nd to Graham Greene of Germantown Friends, who ran 53.87. That’s No. 2 in Pennsylvania this year, behind Anthony Collins of Harry S Truman of Levittown, who ran 53.29 last month in a meet at Randall’s Island.

Iuvara now ranks 5th in South Jersey, No. 1 in South Jersey Group 2 and No. 4 state-wide in Group 2.

In the last 20 years, the only faster Colonial Conference intermediate hurdlers are Haddonfield’s Jordan Harris, who ran 54.75 at the 2011 South Jersey Group 2 meet at Buena, and Cameron Kee of Haddon Heights, who ran 53.88 at the 2019 Group 2 states at Central Regional in Bayville.

At the 1997 Meet of Champions at South Plainfield, legendary Fred Sharpe of Paulsboro ran 51.62 and Woodbury’s Andy Carson 53.84.

Tionna Tobias continued her astonishing breakthrough season in the 100-meter hurdles Thursday with the 4th-fastest time ever recorded by a New Jersey native.

Racing in the NCAA Championships West Preliminaries at Hornet Stadium on the Sacramento (Calif.) State campus, the Winslow graduate and Iowa junior ran 13.11 to easily advance to Saturday’s quarterfinals.

Click to access 029-1.pdf

Tobias lowered her PR from 13.20, which she ran earlier this month on Day 1 of the Big Ten Championship heptathlon, which she won.

Her time is No. 2 in school history behind current teammate Paige Magee, who ran 12.90 in the prelims at the Big Ten Championships. Magee ran 13.06 Thursday and joins Tobias in the quarters on Friday. A third Iowa hurdler, Myreanna Bebe, ran 13.12 and also advanced. They’re the three-fastest Iowa hurdlers in school history.

Click to access 180ed172-top-10-all-time-womens.pdf

Tobias came into the season with a PR of 13.59 from Day 1 of last year’s Big Ten heptathlon. She lowered that to 13.55 last month in a meet in Gainesville and then down to 13.51 in a meet in Waco, also last month. Then came the huge breakthrough down to 13.20 in Bloomington on May 12.

Her 13.11 – with a legal 0.5 wind – puts her behind only Olympians Nia Ali [12.34 at Worlds in Doha in 2019] and Sydney McLaughlin [12.65 in Walnut, Calif., in 2021] as well as Neptune’s Dawn Bowles [12.74 in Indianapolis in 1997] on the all-time New Jersey list.

Tobias has already qualified for the NCAA Championships in Austin June 7-10 in the heptathlon. Because of the nature of the event, there is no qualifying round in the NCAA Prelims.

Tobias went 20-0 1/4 in the long jump immediately after the hurdles but fell just short of advancing to Saturday’s quarterfinals.

Pennsville graduate Arianna Smith, a junior at Princeton, advanced in the 400-meter hurdles at the NCAA Eastern Region Preliminaries Thursday evening in Jacksonville.

Smith, who randomly drew the difficult Lane 8, ran 58.58 to make it to Friday’s quarterfinals. Smith just PR’d at 57.84 in her last race, the final of the Ivy League Championships at Franklin Field earlier this month. Thursday’s 58.58 in the outer-most lane is her 2nd-fastest time ever.

Smith’s 57.84 broke a 40-year-old Princeton school record – 58.19 set by Sally Anderson when she was 9th at the 1983 NCAA Championships in Houston.

The 400IH quarterfinals are scheduled for 7:25 p.m. Saturday. There will be three races with eight runners, with the top three finishers in each race and the next-three-fastest runners advancing to the semifinals at the NCAA Championshiops in Austin next month.