NC State
ACC Championships
Men's Track Finishes 3rd, Women 8th at ACCs
2/26/2011 12:00:00 AM | Track
Feb. 26, 2011
BLACKSBURG, Va. – Sophomore Ryan Hill led a late charge for the NC State men’s track and field team at the ACC Indoor Championships Saturday afternoon by winning the 3,000-meter race, with teammates Andrew Colley and Adam Henken close behind.
And in the final event, sophomores T.J. Graham and Benjamin Major helped the 4X400 relay team finish second, allowing the men’s team to hold on to third place, its highest finish in the ACC indoor meet since 2007.
Final two events netted the Wolfpack 29 of its 83.5 points in the three-day competition. Virginia Tech (140) broke Florida State’ eight-year hold on the men’s indoor title, winning its championship in the sport since joining the league seven years ago.
The Clemson women won their second consecutive title, while NC State finished eighth in the race.
“The 3K and the 4x4 changed the whole complexion of the meet for us,” Hill said. “We were sitting in fifth or sixth before then, and that gave us a huge boost.”
Hill won his race, the next-to-last of the meet, by posting a time of 8:03.57 to win All-ACC honors and his first indoor individual title. Friday night, Hill was the anchor on the Wolfpack distance medley relay team that won the ACC title in the last event of the evening.
Colley’s third-place finish in the 3,000 meters with a time of 8:05.52 earned him his second All-ACC recognition of the meet. Colley was second in the 5,000 meters Friday night.
“Winning the distance medley relay on Friday night was huge for us, because it got the entire team excited going into Saturday,” said veteran track coach Rollie Geiger. “And we finished really strong in the last two events.”
In the 4X400 relay, Graham ran the team’s fastest split in 47.53 seconds, while junior Miles Walker finished with 47.95 to hold off North Carolina senior Charles Cox’s 45.69-second anchor leg. Graham lost two photo finishes earlier in the day, taking second place to Florida State’s Maurice Mitchell in both the 60-meter and 200-meter dashes.
“T.J. was our leading scorer in the meet, finishing second in two individual events and helping the relay team finish second,” Geiger said. “That’s a remarkable feat for someone who just started racing competitively again after three years.”
Both Graham and Hill have now reached NCAA qualifying times and will compete in the NCAA Championships in two weeks in College Station, Texas.
Graham, a receiver on NC State’s Champs Sports Bowl champion football team who won two state titles at Raleigh’s Wakefield High School, couldn’t have been closer in the 60, as both he and Mitchell finished with official times of 6.62 seconds, a career-best for Graham. But Mitchell edged the Wolfpack sprinter at the line, with a fractional time of 6.613 to Graham’s 6.617 seconds.
In the 200, Graham posted a career-best and NCAA automatic qualifying time of 20.79, finishing just behind Mitchell’s 20.76 seconds. Major was sixth in the race with a time of 21.46 seconds.
Junior Kwame Boatwright scored with his seventh-place finish in the triple jump, posting a mark of 49-feet, 1 ¾-inches, while sophomore Daniel Fretz was sixth in the 400 meters with a time of 48.63 seconds.
For the Wolfpack women, junior Lawanda Henry fought through a wrist injury to win All-ACC honors for the second consecutive year with a throw of 51-feet, 2 ¾-inches in the shot put.
Jazueline Daniels was fifth in the triple jump with the best leap of her career, 41-feet, 10-inches. Tiayonna Blackmon was 7th in the 800 meters with a time of 2:09.69.
