Nine Razorback All-american honors close out NCAA Championships

AUSTIN,

Texas – Arkansas wrapped up the 2019 outdoor season with a 15th-place finish at the NCAA Men’s Outdoor Championships fueled by three All-american performances Friday at the University of Texas’ Mike Myers Stadium..

The Razorback scored 19 points to bring home yet another top-20 finish at the outdoor championships finishing in a tie for 15th place with North Carolina A&T.

“I’m just extremely proud of this team,” Arkansas Coach Chris Bucknam said Friday. “We battled, fought, and crawled our way to a 15th-place finish after entering the meet outside the top 20 in the rankings, a similar scenario to the indoor championships (finishing 13th nationally indoors). It’s like I said before after the SEC meet, our culture and our DNA is strong, we compete and fight and our mission is to get back on the rung. We want to be No. 1 again and we had a championship-level effort by all our guys and hopefully this is a catapult to even better things next year. Our 4×100 had two freshmen on it and they turned in a season-best. Cameron [Griffith] beat the defending NCAA Champion and the defending indoor national champion and nearly won it all with a great run. I’m just proud of all these guys and looking forward to next year.”

Texas Tech won the team title with 60 points, Florida followed with 50, Houston third (40), Georgia was fourth (32.5) and Stanford rounded out the top five with 32 points.

The Razorback 4×100meter relay of Josh Oglesby, Kris Hari, Tre’bien Gilbert, and Roy Ejiakuekwu ran a season-best time of 38.58 – the fourth-best performance

in program history – to earn a fourth-place finish Friday. Florida, the NCAA Champion in the event erased a year-old record set by Houston last season at 38.17 as they sprinted across the line in 37.97 to set a facility record, meet record and a collegiate record.

Cameron Griffith capped his career at Arkansas with a huge effort down the final 100 meters past the defending NCAA Champion Ollie Hoare of Wisconsin at the line, securing a third-place finish. Griffith finished with a time of 3:42.14 to earn the highest finish of his career at the NCAA Championships. This marked the second-career First-team All-american performance for Griffith in the 1,500 meters.

Arkansas would have to wait until the final event of the day to step on the track one more time. The 4×400-meter relay team of John Winn (Bryant), Hunter Woodhall, Jalen Brown, and Rhayko Schwartz saved their best for last, running a season-best time of 3:03.40 – the fourth-fastest in program history – for seventh place.

On Wednesday, Arkansas senior decathlete Gabe Moore, coming off a hamstring pull during Arkansas’ second-place team finish at the SEC Outdoor Championships last month in Fayetteville, finished a surprising third in the NCAA Outdoor meet for six team points.