While Texas Tech's women's track and field team has been competitive for many years, it has ceded the spotlight to the school's men's team, which has won eight Big 12 championships and two national titles.
But Saturday was the day for women.
Led by third-place individual finishes from Rosemary Chukwuma and Temitope Adesina, the Texas Tech women's team finished tied for seventh at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon. This was the team's third-best indoor and outdoor finish, with their best results being a fifth-place finish at the 2008 outdoor meet and a solo seventh-place finish at the 2022 outdoor meet.
Tech finished in third place twice, fourth, fifth and eighth for a total of 26 points. Head coach Wes Kitley said his coaching staff came into the day hoping to score 30 points.
“I thought everybody did a really good job,” the Tech coach said, “and I'm happy the girls came out and competed and had a good day like they did today, so that's encouraging. We finished in the top seven in the country, so that's not bad at all.”
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The Florida men's and Arkansas women's teams won the team championships during the four-day tournament at Hayward Field: Florida with 41 points, Auburn with 40 points, Arkansas with 63 points and Florida with 59 points.
For the Red Raiser women, it couldn't have been any better than Adesina's performance. The 25-year-old freshman from Nigeria was one of three athletes to record 6 feet, 5.5 inches in the high jump, breaking the meet record set by Amy Acuff in 1995 and meeting the qualifying standard for this year's Paris Olympics.
Adesina, already Nigeria's number one ranked player this year, all but guaranteed his place in Paris with a tough series, winning 6-3 1/4, 6-4 1/4, 6-5 1/2 in his third and final try.
“This just shows that she's learning how to compete on a big stage for a freshman,” Kitley said. “She didn't think it was too big for her and she didn't panic. She just persevered and got through it.”
Adesina jumped 6 feet, 5 inches at the Corky Classic on Jan. 19, but mistakenly thought the Olympic standard was 1.96 meters and asked for the bar to be set at that height. In reality it was 1.97 meters, or 6 feet, 5 1/2 inches, and that height remained an elusive goal for nearly five months.
Adesina hadn't reached a height taller than 6 feet, 3 inches since then, but on Saturday she competed against Illinois junior Rose Yeboah and Georgia junior Elena Kurichenko. Yeboah and Kurichenko cleared the same bar and made fewer mistakes to take first and second place.
Chukwuma, who already holds the Olympic standard in the 100 meters, clocked a wind-forced 10.90 seconds on Saturday to place third behind Mississippi's Mackenzie Long (10.82) and Louisiana State University's Brianna Liston (10.89).
Serena Clark, Success Umukoro, Alyssa Colbert and Chukwuma placed fifth in the 400m relay with a time of 42.87 seconds.
Other points for the Red Raiders came in the triple jump, where Ann Susanna Foster Katta and Ruta Rasmane placed fourth and eighth, respectively, and in the 5,000 meters, freshman Juliette Cherbet placed fifth with a personal best time of 15:25.41.
In the triple jump, Foster-Katta finished at 44-10 3/4 feet and Rathman at 44-3/2 feet, both with legal clearance. With their top eight finishes at the NCAA Championships, Rathman earned his seventh All-American honor and Foster-Katta earned his fourth.
But eighth place was Lasmane's worst finish in seven appearances, and she won the NCAA indoor championships in March. The Latvian missed the Big 12 Championships because of mononucleosis.
“Poor girl,” Kitley said. “She had mononucleosis before the Big 12 and she's still not fully recovered. I wish I could have stayed with her for another month or so.”
