Abington’s Devin Nugent continues a family tradition with a Penn Relays hurdles title

Devin Nugent knew he hadn’t run his best race, but it didn’t matter. The Abington native and Pitt sophomore clocked the best time in the Penn Relays 400-meter hurdles race, 50.84 seconds, and walked off the track a champion.

“It didn’t go how I thought it would,” Nugent said, noting that something seemed off with the early hurdles. “It was just an off race, but I just kept calm, I just kept my arms moving like my coach told me to do, and it worked out in my favor.”

Asked what specifically was off, Nugent gave an answer that fans and faithful runners alike can appreciate.

“I’m going to be honest, I’m not the most technical or [a] number person,” he said. “I don’t count steps — I just go out there and run. So I don’t really know what the problem was, but the only thing I know is that my coach tells me if there’s a problem, adjust and fix it.”

He had it fixed by the last curve, he said, and it was “just like clockwork again, and muscle memory.”

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Nugent had many old friends from North Penn High in the stands, cheering him on and livening up the late-day atmosphere. Asked where this win ranks in his career, he didn’t hesitate: “Number one for sure.”

But it might have competition in his family’s record book. Relays devotees might remember Nugent’s older sister Leah, who won the high school girls’ 400-meter hurdles title for Abington in 2010 — and six years later ran in the event at the Olympics for Jamaica.

Their parents came down to the track to celebrate with Devin, and met him just after he finished talking with the media. His father, Errol, didn’t have to go far to get there: he works down the street at Penn’s hospital as a manager of clinical engineering. Mother Kimberly used to work there, too.

“I don’t have words for it,” Errol said, “but I’m just so proud of him, following in his sister’s footsteps.”

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Teagan Schein-Becker has been to Franklin Field many times as a runner, while at Perkiomen Valley High and now as a graduate student at Rider.

On Thursday, the native of Trappe, Montgomery County, finally got to celebrate a victory on the famed track. She won the college women’s 1,500-meter championship in 4:09.87, pulling away from Ohio State’s Aniya Mosley on the final lap.

“It’s a personal thing for me, because I’m from Pennsylvania,” Schein-Becker said. “My whole family is here — my uncle flew down from Boston just to come see me race. So just knowing they were there, and some of the high school team [runners] that I coach in the summer, they were also there, and just hearing my name, it’s really special.”

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Penn’s Olivia Morganti gave the home team a championship in the college women’s 3,000-meter steeplechase, winning in 9:57.94.

It was the Quakers’ first ever Relays title in an individual women’s race, and the first individual race title for men or women since Thomas Awad won the men’s Olympic development mile in 2014. The last time Penn won any women’s event at the Relays was the 2010 distance medley relay.

And for Morganti, a senior from Syracuse, N.Y., it was a memory for life to cap off her four years on 33rd Street. She won the race in a rout, with Penn State’s Makenna Krebs second in 10:01.29.

Morganti only ran at the Relays once in high school. But she recalled when she committed to Penn and told people about it back home, she heard plenty about the carnival’s revered place in the sport.

“It’d be some random guy at, like the bagel store: ‘Oh my god, Penn Relays is so awesome — I went there 50 years ago with all my friends, and it was the best weekend,’” she said. “There’s just an awesome atmosphere, and I think it spreads through the running community. People feel it, and there’s really no other meet like this in the country.”

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Upper Dublin, Lower Moreland, and Padua Academy of Wilmington, Del., qualified for the high school girls’ 4x800-meter Championship of America.

Union Catholic of Scotch Plains, N.J., posted the top qualifying time, 9:02.27, and hopes to become the event’s first American back-to-back champion since Columbia of Maplewood, N.J., a decade ago.

Timber Creek was the only local school to qualify for the 4x400 final. The rest of the field for that event and the 4x400 will be mostly Jamaican, as usual: five in the 4x400 and six in the 4x100.

Edwin Allen of Jamaica led the 4x400 qualifiers with a time of 3.41.33. Bullis of Potomac, Md. was the top American school at 3:41.60, No. 3 overall. Hydel of Jamaica led the 4x100 qualifiers at 45.99, and Archbishop Carroll of Washington, D.C. was No. 2 at 46.11.

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