SAN ANTONIO — The UTSA women's track & field team will be back in action at Friday's Howie Ryan Invitational. The one-day meet, which will be the team's final tune-up for next weekend's Conference USA Indoor Championships (Feb. 18-19 in Birmingham, Ala.), is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. at Yeoman Fieldhouse on the campus of the University of Houston and running events are slated to begin two hours later (click here for the complete meet schedule).
Athletes from Jackson State, Lamar, Rice, Texas Southern, Texas State and Texas Wesleyan will join the Roadrunners and host Cougars.
Six Roadrunners — Jackson Brown (60m/400m), Riley Burnside (800m), Derek Fenton (shot put/weight throw), Joseph Freeman (60m), Dario Johnson (800m) and Aaron LeJeune (60m) — are scheduled to compete for UTSA.
The Roadrunners are coming off last weekend's third-place finish at the Armory Invitational.
Victor Perez led the way after registering a program-record toss of 64-5 (19.63m) en route to a gold medal in the weight throw. The performance erased Phil Steinert's five-year-old mark of 63-9 ½ (19.44m), which came at the 2012 Texas Tech Invitational, and it moved the senior from San Antonio up to second place on this year's league leaderboard. It was an improvement of nearly two feet from his previous personal best of 62-7 ¾ (19.09m) that was recorded two weeks ago at the Texas A&M Aggies Invitational and he was named C-USA Field Athlete of the Week on Tuesday.
Patrick Prince sits atop the conference standings and ranks 18th nationally in the 60-meter hurdles with his career-best time of 7.86 that came in last weekend's silver-medal performance in New York City. Other Roadrunners atop league rankings include Kelsey Benoit in shot put with a mark of 79 ½ (17.61m) and Adrian Riley in heptathlon with 4,951 points.
Meanwhile, Vasha Sheriff sits second in the circuit with a time of 47.75 in the 400m and UTSA ranks third in four other events, including the 1,600m relay (3:11.97), distance medley relay (10:11.20), Davante Edwards in the high jump (6-8 ¾/2.05m) and Jacob McDaniel in the heptathlon (4,455 points).
