A&M women finish third at 2025 NCAA Outdoor Championship

That’s another top-three finish at Hayward Field.

Competing in the 2025 NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Ore., the Aggie women finished in third place with 43 points, and triple jumper Winny Bii claimed A&M’s only individual title of the day.

After Pat Henry won his 37th team national championship with the A&M men last night, the women looked to add to that historic number.

The Aggies entered the final day on Saturday with zero points, facing an uphill battle, as SEC foe Georgia led the way with 26 points accumulated from their field events. Despite the Bulldogs being overwhelming favorites, Texas A&M, USC and South Carolina prepared to hunt them down on the track.

Freshman Sofia Yakushina aimed to get the Aggies on the board in the heptathlon. Throughout the week, she finished in fourth place in the 100m hurdles, eighth place in the high jump, 19th place in the shot put and fourth place in the 200m.

She entered the day in eighth place with 3,492 points, but made up a sizeable gap by winning the long jump with a personal best distance of 6.47m, a mark that put her in fourth place all-time in the A&M record book.

Yakushina found herself 168 points behind the leader, Oklahoma’s Pippi Lotta Enok, with two events remaining.

In the javelin, the freshman finished in ninth place and maintained her spot in third place after the 800m, giving her team six points and putting the Aggies in a tie for 18th place in the team standings.

On the track, Texas A&M’s 4x100m relay team of Jasmine Harmon, Camryn Dickson, Bria Bullard and Jasmine Montgomery finished in third place with a season-best time of 42.89, adding six points to the team total as the Aggies moved into the top ten.

Freshman Debora Cherono entered the 3000m steeplechase with the ninth fastest time in the NCAA. Needing to steal some points to maintain her team’s chase for a national title, Cherono delivered with a season-best school-record time of 9:32.10 to earn a fifth-place finish.

Smashing the record she set during the NCAA regionals by nearly 10 seconds, Cherono gave the Aggies four crucial points as they continued to chase down the Bulldogs.

In the 100m hurdles, Jaiya Covington’s late extension to secure second place by two one-thousandths of a second helped the Aggies earn eight more points for their team title chase. The national runner-up finished with a blazing time of 12.928 to put the Aggies into the top five in the team title chase with 24 points.

Elsewhere on the track, Georgia swept the 400m to earn 18 points and essentially clinch their team title. The Aggies and every other team were now racing for second place.

After an initial triple jump of 13.96 m, Winny Bii found herself still in first place after three attempts to advance to the jump-off. Surprisingly, the top four jumpers all posted their best jump in their first attempt and did not improve after five more attempts, meaning Bii’s 13.96m mark was enough to win the triple jump national championship. Adding 10 points to the Maroon & White’s total, a top-three team finish was now within reach for the Aggie women.

The No. 3 ranked 200m runner in the NCAA, Montgomery did not have her best performance in the final, finishing in fifth place behind two Trojans, which drew the race for second place overall even closer.

Entering the 4x400m relay, Georgia clinched the overall title with 63 points, the Trojans had 41 points, and the Aggies sat at 38.

The relay team of Latasha Smith, Dickson, Montgomery and Jaydan Wood needed to outscore the Trojans by at least four points to clinch a second-place outright finish.

Coming down to the final leg, the Aggies and Trojans were neck and neck in fifth and sixth place. Wood didn’t have enough gas left in the tank to out-kick USC down the stretch as Texas A&M’s 4x400m relay would finish in fourth place with a season-best time of 3:27.11, adding five points to their overall score to finish with 43.

Following their 10th-place finish in 2024, this building block season was forged by freshmen and juniors alike, as the majority of the women competing at Hayward Field will have at least one more year of eligibility remaining.

The future is bright for Texas A&M’s women’s track and field.