Lane women’s track and field wins HBCU national championship

Damien Brigham has been the track and field coach at Lane College for less than a year-and-a-half, but he’s already leading the Dragons to becoming a program to know in the sport.

The Dragons traveled to Louisville, Kent., on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to compete in the HBCU Indoor National Championship meet, and the Lady Dragons won the meet with the men coming in third.

“There were about nine or 10 schools there competing,” Brigham said about the meet hosted by Kentucky State. “And we had a good showing.”

Brigham admitted having the meet as early in the semester as it happened did make him have concerns going in.

“When you look at our calendar, our break started the week before Thanksgiving, so it was nearly two months I didn’t see them at all until the week before the meet,” Brigham said. “You want to trust them to keep working during the break, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know not everyone will work throughout the break.

“So we took that week before to really evaluate where everyone was coming out of the break, and we had a few people ready to get to work.”

Some of the athletes that helped the Lady Dragons bring home the championship were Diamond Richardson (discus throw winner and runner-up in shot put), Khamil Evans (fourth in 400-meter sprint and runner-up in 200-meter), Quensha Marshall (winner in the 600-meter and mile runs), Miklyn Chambers (runner-up in long jump) and Kyra Gaston (high jump winner).

Lane still has a couple more indoor meets to compete in during the month of February before outdoor season starts in April.
He said the success the team had in Louisville is hopefully an indicator of more success to come this spring.

“This was the first time that a lot of our athletes were able to actually step foot onto a track,” Brigham said about his team who does a lot of training in the old Lincoln Elementary School building that Lane acquired from Jackson-Madison County Schools in 2019. “We work a lot in here on technique, but with them being able to actually get on a track and compete in their events, we got everybody on film, so we’re able to go back and see what they’re doing right and wrong and build on that.

“But with one team winning and the other team finishing third, we’ve already got a very solid foundation to build on.” Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news