Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State senior distance runner Hailey Brumfield will join an exclusive club in program history when she laces up her shoes Thursday for the NCAA East Preliminary meet.
Brumfield earned a spot at this week’s event in Jacksonville, Fla., with a school-record 10,000-meter run time of 34 minutes, 47.58 seconds at Bucknell in mid-April. Tiffany Brigham in 2008 (100-meter dash) and Cassandra Lloyd from 2009-12 (100-meter hurdles) are the only other Raiders to make it this far.
“I went into the race with that goal in mind of trying to qualify for the regional meet. Leading into it I didn’t think that I would,” Brumfield said. ”When I actually ran faster than what I thought I could, I just walked off and started crying because it started to set in that I would have a chance to go.”
“Just as the runners before Hailey showed that in our program you can be successful at the Horizon League level, this accomplishment certainly makes running at the national level a bit more realistic and tangible,” Wright State coach Rick Williamson said.
The former Tippecanoe High School runner didn’t envision reaching these heights when she made her collegiate debut in the fall of 2013. As a high school freshman and sophomore in running and competitive cheerleading, Brumfield sustained a stress fracture in her tibia and was starting to feel burnt out after graduation.
