6/3/2002

BATON ROUGE, La. - Georgetown ended competition at the 2002 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships last Friday, May 31, with GU athletes participating in the finals of three events. Senior Tyrona Heath (Endicott, N.Y./Union Endicott) and junior Marni Kruppa (Dublin, Ohio/Dublin Coffman) represented the women in the 800m and 5,000m, respectively, while grad student Josh Rollins (Odenton, Md./Arundel) competed in the triple jump for the men's team. Rollins and Heath both registered point-scoring efforts to guide the men's team to a tie for 59th place (two points) and the women's team to tie for 45th place (four points). LSU (64 points) won the men's competition, while South Carolina (82 points) took first place on the women's side.

Heath recorded Georgetown's top finish, timing 2:05.94 for fifth place in the 800m. After leading all competitors with a career-best 2:03.81 during the preliminaries on Wednesday, Heath crossed the line of the finals 0.96 seconds behind winner Alice Schmidt of North Carolina, who broke the tape in 2:04.73. Heath's fifth place finish follows a similar effort at the 2002 NCAA Indoor Championships, where she clocked 2:06.61 to also place fifth. The performance garners Heath Outdoor All-America recognition.

After running the 10,000m on Wednesday, Kruppa competed with only one day of rest to record a time of 16:55.82 in the 5,000m run. The mark placed Kruppa in 16th place behind Stanford's Lauren Fleshman, who paced the field with a time of 15:53.91.

Rollins registered a mark of 15.90m for seventh place in the triple jump. Walter Davis of LSU took first in the event with a leap of 17.34m.