Saturday, March 11, 2023

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – Seattle Pacific senior Vanessa Aniteye proved without a doubt Saturday that “motherhood and an athletic career don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

Aniteye went from being out of the sport nearly three years ago after the birth of her child to a national champion Saturday, winning the women’s 800 meters to lead the GNAC on the final day of the NCAA Division II Indoor Track and Field Championships at the Virginia Beach Sports Center.

Aniteye, whose journey back to track competition was featured in The Seattle Times on Friday, surged over the final 200 meters of the race to claim the championship with a lifetime best time of 2:06.84. She was two-tenths of a second ahead of CSU Pueblo’s Helen Braybook, who has the fastest time in the preliminaries.

The time moves Aniteye to No. 5 on the GNAC all-time list. She is the 17th indoor Division II champion in GNAC history and the first for Seattle Pacific since Jessica Pixler and the Falcons’ women’s distance medley relay team in 2010.

Aniteye’s title led four All-American performances on the day for the conference. Two of those trophies went to Simon Fraser’s Marie-Éloïse Leclair, The sophomore opened the day with a seventh-place finish in the women’s 60 meters with a time of 7.47 seconds. An hour-and-a-half later, Leclair placed fifth in the women’s 200 meters with a time of 23.84 seconds.

Northwest Nazarene sophomore Steven Schmidt surged on the second day of the heptathlon to not only earn an All-American trophy but winning it with one of the best efforts in conference history. Schmidt finished third with a score of 5,523 points which set an NNU record and ranks him No. 2 on the GNAC all-time list.

Schmidt’s best second-day performance came in the pole vault where he placed fifth with a clearance of 15 feet, 7 inches. He went on to close the heptathlon with a fifth-place finish in the 1,000 meters in a time of 2:50.31. Schmidt was also entered in Saturday’s high jump final, but did not clear the opening height of 6 feet, 8.25 inches.

The GNAC’s only other competitor on Saturday was Western Oregon junior Hunter Hutton, who just missed the podium with a ninth-place finish in the finals of the men’s mile with a time of 4:10.20.

Both Alaska Anchorage sophomore Coleman Nash and Simon Fraser sophomore Charlie Dannatt, who were entered in the men’s 3,000 meters, scratched prior to the start of the race.