Kentucky track and field standouts Dezerea Bryant and Kendra Harrison are semifinalists for the Bowerman Award, the highest collegiate recognition in the sport.
The duo led the Wildcats to a school-record NCAA Runner-up team finish earlier this month.
The Bowerman Watch List Committee named 10 women as semifinalists, the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association announced. The committee will now vote to determine three finalists, who will be revealed on July 9.
Bryant and Harrison are Kentucky’s first-ever semifinalists and both will compete for a place on the U.S. World Championships team at the USATF Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon, later this week.
Bryant won the NCAA 200-Meter Championships with the low-altitude collegiate-record time (22.18) to upset a field, which included two previous NCAA 200m Champions and the woman who won the NCAA 100m title earlier in the meet. She was the silver medalist in both short sprints at the SEC indoor meet before taking bronze in the 200m and seventh in the 60m at indoor NCAAs.
Outdoors, she was bronze medalist in the 100m and 200m at the SEC championships before breaking out in Eugene. Her NCAA 200m winning time of 22.18 seconds came just 45 minutes after taking bronze in the 100.
Harrison, also a senior, won two national championships in 2015 and came a few tenths of a second shy of winning a third. She was named USTFCCCA National Track Athlete of the Year by Division I coaches after she won the 60-meter hurdles indoors, the 100m hurdles outdoors, and took second in the 400m hurdles outdoors.
Her times in the 100m hurdles (12.50) and 60m hurdles (7.87) make her the third fastest college woman ever, trailing only Ginnie Powell and Bowerman winner Brianna Rollins in both events, and she is the fifth-fastest collegian ever in the 400m hurdles. Her times are all the more impressive considering they came within 35 minutes of one another.
For context, Harrison’s NCAA-winning 100m hurdles time of 12.55 (making her the No. 2 performer in the world this year) would have equaled the bronze medal performance at the 2013 IAAF World Championships, while her 400m hurdles time (also ranked No. 2 in the world this year) would have equaled the silver medal performance as the last World Championships, and none of the women in that 2013 World Championship Final had run a race earlier that day or the day prior.
Harrison won SEC championships in both short hurdles, in fact she went undefeated indoors and outdoors in short hurdles finals this year.
From UK Athletics