Record-Setting weekend for Leonce, Scheper

With most of the United States collegiate indoor track and field season over, we've already seen three new St Lucia National Records established. But with a couple of weeks remaining, there's time still to put down some new marks. This weekend, a couple of St Lucian ladies posted new personal-best performances in their respective events, and although they were not National Records, Christabel Leonce and Jeannelle Scheper set school and facility records at two different meets.

Leonce, a junior at Northwest Nazarene University, helped her women's team to third place at the Great Northwest Athletic Conference indoor championships, a home meet at the Jackson Center in Nampa, Idaho. Leonce was the third-highest point scorer for the Crusades, with nine. In the 200m dash on Saturday she finished fourth in 25.93 seconds, and in the 60m dash, she ended in 8.12, good for fifth place.

In the 60m dash preliminaries, though, Leonce - a graduate of Sir Arthur Lewis Community College in St Lucia - became the first woman in Crusader history ever to run the distance in under 8 seconds, her time of 7.98 seconds eclipsing the 8.00 seconds she ran two weeks prior. Teammate Melissa Grammer ran 8.04 in the preliminaries and failed to advance.

Meanwhile, the University of South Carolina held the Gamecock Invitational at the USC Indoor Fieldhouse in Columbia. The Gamecock women hit four facility marks, including one in women's High Jump. St Lucian freshman Jeannelle Scheper cleared a personal best 5'8 ¾ (1.75m) to break the 16-year old record by three inches. Scheper jumped from 17th to fourth on the SEC performance list in one day while also cracking the national top 40 in the event.

Photo credit: Scott Kinnaman, NNU Track & Field Sports Information Assistant