NC State
NCAA Regional Championships
Iyevbele, Graham Advance To NCAA Finals
5/27/2011 12:00:00 AM | Track
May 27, 2011
Day 2 Results 
Live Results | NCAA East Region Preliminary
Saturday TV coverage (6 p.m.)
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – NC State’s Kenyetta Iyevbele scorched the track Friday afternoon in the semifinals of the 800-meter race at the NCAA East Region preliminaries at Indiana University and earned a spot in the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in two weeks in Des Moines, Iowa.
The freshman from Charlotte, N.C., posted a mark of 2:05.87 in her race, cutting more than two seconds off her personal best and finishing ninth overall at Indiana’s Haugh Track and Field Complex.
She will be joined at the championship meet by sophomore sprinter T.J. Graham of Raleigh, who advanced to the finals in the 100-meter dash with a time of 10.43 seconds.
Graham earned his way to the finals by the narrowest of margins. The top 12 finishers in each event advance to the finals, and Graham, Virginia Tech’s Keith Ricks and three others all posted nearly identical times.
When it was divided to the 1000ths of a second, Ricks was 11th at 10.422, Graham was 12th at 10.424 and Purdue’s Shane Crawford was 13th at 10.432.
Graham, a two-time state champion in high school who has spent his first three seasons of college playing wide receiver for the NC State football team, is in his first year of running track for the Wolfpack. He also advanced to the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships in March, in both the 60- and 200-meter dashes. He earned second-team All-American honors in the 60-meter dash.
The Wolfpack entered the day with one entry already headed to the finals. In Friday’s first day of competition, junior Andie Cozzarelli was 10th in the 10,000-meter race to earn her trip to the championship meet, which will be held June 8-11 on the campus of Drake University.
Other NC State participants who competed Friday but did not advance included a pair of steeplechasers, freshman Erin Mercer and senior Kara McKenna, who finished 39th and 40th overall, respectively, and high jumper Danielle Adams.
For the men, junior Kwame Boatwright of Durham was 18th overall in the triple jump, with a mark of 49-feet, 7 inches, followed by junior teammate Travis Weston of Fayetteville at 47-feet, 2 1/4-inches. Junior Brian Himmelright of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, was 29th overall in the men’s 3,000-meter steeplechase with a time of 8:52.58.
The Wolfpack has several athletes who will compete in Saturday’s third and final day at the preliminary meet. Discus throwers Brittany Hampton of Monroe, N.C., and Nathaniel Williams of Newport, N.C., will compete in the morning, while distance runners Ryan Hill of Hickory, N.C., and Andrew Colley of Williamsburg, Va., will run in the 5,000 meter race – the next-to-last event of the meet – late Saturday evening.
In between, the Wolfpack men’s 4X100-meter relay team of Graham, A’Tolani Akinkuotu, Lamont Savage and Tobias Palmer will compete in the preliminary heats of that event.
