Spring has turned out to be quite the championship season for North Vancouver’s Nicole Hutchinson.
The 20-year-old University of Villanova runner racked up another award in what’s turned into a fabulous few months: Saturday, she was named women’s relay athlete of the meet at the famed Penn Relays in Philadelphia after leading her team to a pair of long-distance relay titles.
Led by Hutchinson, Villanova won the distance medley relay (a.k.a. the DMR) — four runners individually run the 1,200-metres, 400-m, 800-m and 1,600-m legs — on Thursday, and then, on Friday, they won the 4 x 1,500-m relay.
Hutchinson ran the opening leg of the DMR and found herself 30 m in the lead when she handed off the baton to teammate McKenna Keegan, a dominating opening run that Hutchinson admitted afterwards caught her off-guard.
“I checked over my inside shoulder and I didn’t see anyone and I got really confused. Then I checked over my outside shoulder and I still didn’t see anyone. So I kind of figured, ‘OK, I guess it’s just me,’ ” she told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Her coach, Gina Procaccio, had told her to keep it cool for the first lap and then to take off, but she found herself at the front almost from the get-go and so the pre-race plan went out the window.
“I got myself right at the front and no one was willing to go by me, so I figured, ‘Yes, I might as well take it right from the gun and just go with it.’ ”
Hutchinson ran her 1,200 m in 3:21.86; the team — which also included Keegan (400 m), Rachel McArthur (800 m) and Siofra Cleirigh Buttner (1,600 m) — won the race in 11:01.94, less than two seconds ahead of runners-up Notre Dame.
In Friday’s 1,500 relay, Hutchinson’s teammates Kelsey Margey, Kaley Ciluffo and Lauren Ryan kept things tight, with Indiana leading by a hair’s breadth at the final pass, leaving Hutchinson in position to strike on the anchor leg.
Hutchinson outpaced everyone in the race — no matter the leg — running her 1,500 in 4:16.9, about 6 1/2 seconds faster than Indiana anchor Katherine Receveur. Margey, Ciluffo and Ryan all had times between 4:24 and 4:30; Villanova’s winning time was 17:35.48.
“I was super-excited watching them run with so much heart, and Lauren kicking it in getting as close as she could,” Hutchinson, who is wrapping up her third year at the Philadelphia university, told reporters after Friday’s race. “I knew I was going to work my way up in the first lap, then I felt confident that I could get it done. That’s what the Penn Relays are about, watching them run as hard as they could.”
“I told all of them that you don’t have to be a hero,” Procaccio said after the 4 x 1,500. “All they had to do was put (Nicole) in the race and she would get it done. I was confident that we had an anchor that could beat anybody, so they didn’t have to blow it open and risk going out too hard.”
Hutchinson and Villanova now have the Big East outdoor championships next month, followed by NCAA regionals and then the U.S. championships in June.
Hutchinson has been on fire for the last three months: In March, she won the 1,500 at the Penn Challenge and then the 5,000 at the Raleigh Relays.
In February, she helped Villanova take the team title at the Big East indoor championship by taking a personal win in the mile and then joining with teammates to win the 4 x 800 relay. Earlier in the month, Hutchinson’s squad won the DMR at the UCS Invitational.
The three-day Penn Relays drew 108,755 fans to the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field.
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