Cornell women’s track and field completed its first outdoor meet of the season at the UCF Knights Invite on March 28.
The event marked an important start to Cornell’s outdoor campaign, providing athletes and coaches with a chance to assess performances in a new environment. The team participated in both field and track events throughout the competition.
In the high jump, Syna Sony finished seventh with a clearance of 1.67 meters, while Paula-Marie Brown placed tenth at 1.62 meters. In the triple jump, Anika Sukumar led Cornell with a twelfth-place mark of 11.79 meters, followed by Sarah Caldwell in fourteenth (11.68 meters) and Elizabeth Graham in nineteenth (11.09 meters).
On the track, Cornell’s 4×100-meter relay team—composed of Bamgboye, Beckham, Casa, and Edgecomb—placed sixth with a time of 45.78 seconds. In individual events, Francine Stevens led Cornell in the 400 meters by finishing fourteenth in 55.09 seconds; Rachel Bethke (seventeenth), Eden Oje (twenty-first), Justine Hounsell (thirty-first), and Elika Vahhaji (thirty-sixth) also competed.
Natasha Redmond paced Cornell in the 100-meter dash with a twentieth-place finish at 11.89 seconds; Olivia Walters finished twenty-fourth (11.95 seconds), Brianna Beckham was twenty-sixth (12 seconds), and Jodi Parrott placed forty-second (12.61 seconds). The team’s top result came from the closing event: Walters, Redmond, Sawyer, and Bethke took third place in the 4×400-meter relay with a time of 3:49.13.
“It’s nice to get the first outdoor meet in the books,” head coach Mike Henderson said. “It gives us a much better idea of what we have to work on and how we have to keep adjusting for the extra variables that come with moving to the bigger track and the ever-changing weather.”
Cornell will continue its season at its next scheduled competition—the Bucknell Bison Invite—on Friday, April 10.
