Hendrix, McBride Prevail; CSUN Men Take 2nd

A seasoned veteran and a relative newcomer used the same tactic to win their respective races and lead the Cal State Northridge men’s track and field team to a second-place finish in the NCAA Division II championships Saturday.

Redshirt junior Kevin Hendrix won the 100 meters and freshman Erick McBride took the 800 at Hampton University’s Armstrong Field. Both started quickly and never looked back.

As a result, the Matadors totaled 60 points to finish behind St. Augustine’s (N.C), which scored 111 points and won its second consecutive team title.

Hampton (56 points), California Collegiate Athletic Assn. champion Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (53) and Cal State Los Angeles (49) rounded out the top five.

Lolita Pile led the Northridge women to a fifth-place showing by finishing second in the triple jump for the second consecutive year, and the Lady Matadors’ 400-meter relay team placed fourth.

San Luis Obispo scored 116 points to win its second consecutive title, followed by Norfolk State (72), Abilene Christian (62), Alabama A & M (56) and Northridge (44 1/2).

“We couldn’t have asked for much more,” Northridge assistant Tony Veney said. “To have three individual champions is just super.”

In addition to Hendrix and McBride, freshman Chris Perry won the long jump Thursday, marking the first time the Matadors have produced three men’s winners in the Division II meet.

Set to move to Division I in the fall in all sports except football Northridge went out in style.

Hendrix, who has been nursing a foot injury all season, got off to the “best start of my life” in the 100 in upsetting favorite Kenneth Brokenburr of St. Augustine’s, 10.50 seconds to 10.52.

Hendrix, who teamed with Melvin Jones, Chris Pippins and Wade Smart to place fifth in the 400 relay (40.46), would have had a greater margin of victory but raised his arms in celebration five meters before the finish line.

“I couldn’t believe how well I got out,” Hendrix said. “I couldn’t feel anyone around me after the first 10 meters and that really surprised me. For a split second, I thought I might have false-started, but when I didn’t hear a second gun, I just kept pouring it on.”

Although Hendrix came back to set a Northridge record of 20.87 seconds in the 200, he finished third behind Terrence Warren (20.67) of Hampton and Brokenburr (20.70).

Fourth coming off the turn, Hendrix made up a couple of meters on the leaders in the final 100.

“Because of my foot, I just can’t run the turns that hard,” Hendrix said.

McBride did not finish fast in the 800, but he didn’t have to after blowing the race open early.

McBride, the Southern Section 4-A Division champion at Palmdale High last year, had a 10-meter lead after passing the 400 mark in 52.3. When he had run 600 meters in 1:19.8, his advantage had grown to 12 or 13 meters.

Ali Mahamed of St. Augustine’s made a rush in the final straightaway but finished two or three meters behind McBride, who won in 1:49.34.

“The first 400 felt really comfortable and easy,” McBride said. “But I started to get scared in the last 200. I kept waiting for someone to come up on me, but it never happened.”

Shunning conventional tactics, which say that runners win national championships in the 800 by outkicking opponents, McBride dared his competitors to start quickly with him.

“We figured if he went out fast, he was strong enough to hold off the rest of the field,” Northridge assistant Bob Augello said. “We thought it would have been a bigger gamble to let it turn into a kicker’s race.”

Pile was hoping to challenge Diana Wills of Army in the triple jump, but the two-time defending champion never gave her the chance, bounding a wind-aided 44 feet 11 3/4 inches in the second round of the first flight of jumpers.

Jumping in the second flight, Pile was forced to play catch-up, but her wind-aided 41-10 3/4 in the sixth and final round left her well behind the Army senior.

Tonya Conner, Pile’s freshman teammate, finished sixth at 40-2 3/4.

Other top Northridge performances came from freshman Cela Taylor, who finished fifth in the women’s 400 in a personal best of 55.32, and Pippins, who placed fifth in the 100 in 10.64.

The wins by Hendrix and McBride, which came within 20 minutes of each other, helped turn around a day that had started poorly for the Northridge men. Perry had placed a non-scoring ninth (47-5 3/4) in the triple jump and Jorge Castro and Sasha Vujic had finished out of the money in the 1,500.

Vujic, still recovering from a fractured left foot, finished 12th; Castro dropped out after 500 meters because he was having difficulty breathing due to a chest cold.