For the second time this season, Wichita State juniors Brady Palen and Adria Navajon are AAC champions in the high jump and decathlon, respectively.
After winning the crown at the indoor competition in February, Palen cleared 2.19m to take the outdoor title over the weekend at the AAC Outdoor Championships in San Antonio.
Navajon won his fifth overall decathlon title with 7,213 points, a personal-best. He won the 100-meter and long jump and placed second in the 110-meter hurdles and pole vault en route to the overall win.
The men’s and women’s teams both placed fourth overall with 90 and 69 points, respectively. The placings are one-spot improvements over the February competition. As in the indoor championship, South Florida won the men’s title with 217 points while Charlotte won the women’s crown with 142 points.
Aside from the two winners, Wichita State took eight other podium finishes to earn all-conference recognition. Freshman Josh Parrish finished second in the 110-meter hurdles with a personal-best 13:82 time and third in the long jump at 7.59m. Junior Hudson Bailey finished with 6,844 points in the decathlon, good for third place.
On the women’s side, junior Farrah Miller ran the second-fastest 800-meter time in WSU history, 2:06.24, good for second place. Miller lost out on a first-place finish by about a quarter of a second.
Junior Destiny Masters collected a pair of podium finishes with second place in the high jump at 1.80m and second in the heptathlon with 5,601 points. Masters didn’t win an individual event in the heptathlon competition but came in second three times.
After a disqualification due to falling outside the track in the indoor 5,000-meter race, junior Lucy Ndungu came back to place second in the event in the outdoor competition at 16:46.49. Deja vu struck in the 10,000-meter, as Ndungu fell again but recovered for another silver finish at 37:53.73.
With the regular schedule over, the top Shockers will look to compete at the NCAA West Preliminaries in Fayetteville, Arkansas, from Thursday, May 22 to Saturday, May 25.
