CLEVELAND, Ohio – Brandeis University senior Erin Magill (Moretown, Vt./Harwood Union) won the University Athletic Association title in the 5,000-meter run today, leading the women's track and field team to a tie for third place in the standings after Day One of the UAA Championships with 21.5 points. The Brandeis men sit in sixth place with four points so far. Case Western Reserve University is serving as the event hosts.
Magill won the 5,000-meter run in commanding fashion. Her personal-best time of 17:09.99 was about 14 seconds faster than the runner-up from Chicago. Without accounting for other conference championship meets this weekend, Magill's time is ranked 11th in Division III this season. Magill is the first Brandeis runner to win the 5,000-meters at the UAA Indoor Championships since Heather Davidson '01 in 2000. She is just the third Judge overall to win the event.
The Judges had one other All-UAA performance on the first day of the meet, as the women's distance medley relay team placed third overall with a time of 12:15.62, just over a second faster than fourth-place Carnegie Mellon. The team of senior Natalie Hattan (Sugar Land, Texas/Clements), sophomore Liz Korn (Piedmont, Calif. / Piedmont), junior Victoria Morrongiello (Staten Island, N.Y. / Susan E. Wagner) and senior Niamh Kenney (Hanover, Mass./Hanover) made sure that a Brandeis DMR earned All-Association honors for the eighth time in the last nine championship meets. The time is the 15th best in Division III this season, with the winning team from Washington University holding the nation's fastest time.
The Judges had four other scoring performances on the day. Topping the list was sophomore Smiley Huynh (Bronx, N.Y. / Bronx H.S. of Science), who scored in a pair of field events for the women. Huynh tied for fifth place in the pole vault with a height of 3.32 meters, just shy of her career-best set the previous week. In the long jump, she placed seventh with a distance of 5.15 meters.
On the men's side, senior Dion Morris-Evans (Canal Fulton, Ohio/Northwest) came in eighth in the high jump with a height of 1.84 meters, with a host of competitors just ahead at 1.89 meters. The men's DMR placed sixth with a time of 10:55.49. The squad was made up of senior Jacob Grant (Rockville Center, N.Y. / South Side), junior Dean Campbell (Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass. / Manchester-Essex Regional), senior Aaron Portman (Wheeling, Ill. / Adlai E. Stevenson) and sophomore Willem Goff (Pelham, Mass./Amherst Regional).
In the day's preliminaries, Brandeis had four runners qualify for tomorrow's finals with a chance to score more points. The women's 60-meter hurdles was the team's best performance on the day, with senior Sonali Anderson (Fayetteville, Ga. / Whitewater) lowering her own school record by 0.07 seconds to 9.21 seconds. Anderson finished with the fifth seed. Sophomore Alya Campbell (Eastchester, N.Y. / Eastchester) ran a time of 9.41 seconds and edged the ninth-place finisher from WashU by three-thousandths of a second for the eight spot in the finals. In the 400-meter dash, senior Devin Hiltunen (Quincy, Mass./North Quincy) also narrowly secured the last spot in the finals, running 1:00.10, making it by two-hundredths of a second.
On the men's side, senior Reese Farquhar (Newton, Mass./Newton North) claimed a spot in the finals in the 200-meter dash with a time of 23.03 seconds. He edged out the ninth-place finisher from WashU by 0.18 seconds.
Day Two of the 2022 UAA Championships starts tomorrow at 9 a.m. at Case Western Reserve.