The Tribune

By RENALDO DORSETT

Sports Reporter

rdorsett@tribunemedia.net

SEVERAL of the country’s top junior sprinters signed national letters of intent to join elite NCAA Division I track and field programmes for the Fall 2015 semester.

Outgoing high school seniors Keianna Albury, Xavier Coakley, Jenae Ambrose and junior college transfer Kirk Lewis will take their talents to the Big 10, SEC and ACC conferences.

Albury, a sprint specialist, former standout for the St Augustine’s College Big Red Machine and Club Monica Athletics member, will join the Penn State Nittany Lions.

The two-time Scotiabank Bright Future Most Outstanding Athlete award winner will enter her collegiate career with personal bests of 11.56s in the 100m and 23.54s in the 200m.

Some of her other awards include the BAAA Most Outstanding Youth award and Anita Doherty Junior Female Track Athlete of the Year.

She was a gold medal winner in the 200m,  bronze medal winner in the 100m and a member of the silver medal winning 4x100m team at the 2014 Central American and Caribbean Junior Championships.

At the 2015 CARIFTA Games, she finished with a silver in the 100m, bronze in the 200m and was a member of the silver medal winning 4x100m team.

Albury joins the Nittany Lions programme that fetters fellow Bahamian Danielle Gibson and posted their 13th-straight top-five finish at the 2015 Big Ten Indoor Track & Field Championships.

“Once again our staff here at Penn State has put together an outstanding freshman class of Nittany Lions,” Nittany Lions head coach John Gondak said on the school’s athletic website.

“As you can see from the range of high quality athletes covering many different events, we continue to work toward being a nationally competitive, broad based cross country/track and field programme. With the recruits we have joining the programme along with a very talented group of returning student-athletes, Penn State will continue to field competitive teams in the fall during cross country and during the winter and spring track seasons.”

Coakley, also a member of the Big Red Machine and Club Monica Athletics, will join the Auburn University Tigers alongside Ambrose, the Queen’s College Comets standout.

A sprint hurdler, he has posted a personal best of 13.64s in the 110m hurdles and 52.50s in the 400m hurdles.

At the 2015 CARIFTA championships,  he finished with a silver medal in the under-20 boys 110m hurdles in 13.51s and was a member of the silver medal winning 4x100m team.

At the international level, he was a semi-finalist in the 110m hurdles and 400m hurdles at the 2013 IAAF World Youth Championships and ran the 10th-best time by a junior in the 110m hurdles at 13.64s.

Ambrose, a short sprinter, has personal best times of 11.74s in the 100m and 24.18s in the 200m. She highlighted this season with a bronze medal in the under-20 girls 100m at CARIFTA.

She also recorded a top-5 finish in the 100m at the 2014 Youth Olympic Games.

“I am really excited. This is probably the most excited I have been in my 18 years as head coach at Auburn,” said Tigers head coach Ralph Spry on the school’s athletic website.

“We have had some great classes when we won the National Championship in 2006 and we had multiple second place finishes, but this class has a lot of very talented athletes that cover a lot of events. They have competed at the World Junior Championships and we have some of the highest ranked Americans. I am really looking forward to next season, because we will have two teams, the men and women, that will be back in the game and be competitive. I believe things are back in place with this team. I think there is a bright future here with everything we have coming.”

Lewis will transfer from Essex JuCo following his sophomore season and will join Clemson Tigers. He has posted a personal best time of 13.90s in the 110m hurdles.

At this year’s National Junior College Championships, Lewis was fourth in the men’s 110 hurdles with a time of 14.10s. He ran faster in a wind-aided 13.97 for fifth in the preliminaries to qualify for the final.

Lewis was also a member of Team Bahamas at the 15th IAAF World Junior Championships where he he went on to finish seventh in the semis in a time of 14.05s to finish at No.21 in the field.