2016-17 Track Man of the Year

James Randon completed his senior year at Yale back in June 2017.  Over the course of his final collegiate season, he accomplished some feats that no Yale athlete has done in 27 years:

  • Randon won the 2016 Heps Cross Country individual title, the first Bulldog to do so since Jim Gibson (Yale ’91) did so in 1989.
  • Randon won the Indoor Heps 3,000m in 8:04.87, a first for Yale since Gibson won in 1990 (8:23.42).
  • Randon was honored with as the Most Outstanding Track Athlete at the 2017 Indoor Heps meet for winning the 3,000m and anchored Yale’s distance medley team to a win in the 9th fastest time in meet history (9:50.30), Yale’s first honoree since Gibson was honored in 1990 (for, interestingly enough, winning that same double).

Now, he did do some things outside of Gibson’s shadow as Randon is a stronger middle distance runner compared to Gibson.  This is evident with Randon’s 1,500m time – at the start of the 2017 outdoor season, Randon blazed to a 3:42.33 time to set an early national leading time in early April that held for a few weeks.  This 3:42 mark ended up being the 24th fastest performance done within the NCAA qualification window.   Randon’s best performance came JUST OUTSIDE of that qualification window.  At the Swathmore Final Qualifier, Randon set a four second personal best where he finished as the top collegian in a speedy 3:37.93 – the third fastest 1,500m performance in conference history.

Randon graduated this past June as multiple Heps champion (three from 2017, one from 2016), a First-Team All-American (8th place finish at the 2016 NCAA Outdoor Championships), and a 3:58.85 indoor miler (shown above, as he won the 2016 IC4A mile title, becoming the first Yale athlete to go sub-4 in the mile).  Given how competitive the middle distance events are within the Ivy League, that is quite an accomplishment.

 

photo by Michael Scott

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2017 at 8:00 am. It is filed under Athletes, Awards, Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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