By Madyson Montoya (@MadysonMontoya )
Women’s track and field traveled down to San Diego to compete in the Mountain West Conference Challenge Friday to face San Diego State, Nevada and UNLV.
The focus for the Spartans was all jumping and sprinting related. The team only competed in one distance event and no throwing events.
The Spartans started the day in the 4 x 100 meter relay where the team took third out of the four entries.
SJSU then headed to the 100 meter hurdles, a proven-strong event for the Spartans. SJSU entered three competitors, all of whom came out in the top five.
Junior Brittany Brown took second with a time of 14.31 in the event. Right behind her in third was sophomore Jayla Williams and senior Makayla Webb in fourth.
Freshman Lovenie Dantes was the only Spartan representative in the 400 meter dash, coming out in fourth place out of seven with a time of 56.06.
After not competing last year, senior Madiha Raza was the Spartans’ top finisher in the 100 meter dash. She came in fourth, just one second behind the second and third place competitors. Sophomore Breya Carter finished .19 seconds behind her to come in sixth.
Up next was the 400 meter hurdles where Tabron finished in fourth and Webb in sixth.
The largest event of the meet was the 200 meter dash, having a total of 17 runners competing. Dantes was SJSU’s top finisher in eighth place with Raza in 15th. The competition was tough as the top eight were each separated by less than a second.
Distance continuously came up as the team’s weakness once it came to the 1500 meter run, where there was nine competitors. Sophomore Camilla Hanson came in eighth with senior Carmen Contreras in ninth.
SJSU was able to gain six points by finishing in third in the 4 x 400 meter relay. SDSU dominated the event finishing in first by over 10 seconds. SJSU was less than a second behind second place finisher UNLV.
The Spartans were able to take a breather before they changed the mindset for the jumping events.
Juniors Kolbi Sims and Natalie Gutierrez tied for fifth place out of 11 with a height of 1.60 meters in the high jump event.
Senior Cambree Harbaugh put up five points by herself in the triple jump where she came in fourth.
Three events went by before the Spartans competed in their last event, the long jump.
SJSU entered five jumpers into the event, all of whom finished in the top half. Sophomore Destiny Longmire took second place with Harbaugh in fourth, Brown in fifth and Sims in sixth.
The long jump event put the Spartans up 12 points.
SJSU finished the meet in fourth place with 86 points. The small successes against its conference competitors was not enough to make up for zero participation in the throwing events.
The team will head to Azusa, Calif. on April 18th to compete in the California Invitational Multis.
