Penn Relays 2025 Preview
The Penn Relays have arrived! There’s a reason why schools build their spring schedules – and even their winter schedules, to some extent – around this gigantic meet. Three straight days of fast races, thrilling finishes, wild baton exchanges, and roaring crowds make for an experience unlike any other. It’s not an invitational, it’s a carnival!
Here is a day-by-day guide of what to watch for as Mercer County athletes descend on Philly this week.
Thursday
Boys Shot Put. The carnival will begin on Thursday morning with Sean Wilton (Princeton, Sr.), who received a well-deserved invitation to compete in the boys shot put after throwing 62-2.25 for 3rd place at the Meet of Champions. The shot put start list includes 9 of the top 11 throwers in New Jersey from this past winter, so this is a good chance to see how he currently stacks up against the rest of the state’s best.
Boys 4x100m. The first events on the track on Thursday will be the boys 4x100m. This will be the first major race for most 4x100m teams since last outdoor season, so we’ll get a better sense of whose sprinters are in flying form right now.
One team that is definitely in good shape is Allentown. After blasting a 43.05 to win their division at Woodbury last weekend, Cedric Mbachu, Matthew Woode, Scott Jordan, and Gavin Alvarez will be heading to the Penn Relays with the goal of producing an even better performance at an even bigger venue. Another team clearly ready to run fast is WWP South, who took 3rd place at the TCNJ Invitational with a 43.56. Their Penn Relays lineup will be Aydun Hines, Ashe Lee, Julius Kinsler, and Josiah Cureton. To put Allentown’s and WWP South’s early-season times in perspective, they’ve already run faster this year than anyone in Mercer County did last year, outside of Robbinsville’s star-studded team.
Boys 4x400m. Thursday afternoon will contain four hours of boys 4x4s, and most Mercer County schools will have a team entered. Who will run the fastest? Will we see any spectacular splits?
The top two teams from the TCNJ Invitational will be back in action, though in separate heats this time. WW-P South ran a county-leading 3:28 to win that invitational, and they’re running another very strong squad here with Josiah Cureton, Aydun Hines, Sean Maina, and Julius Kinsler. Can Kinsler, the top 400m runner in the county right now, split sub-49 again and take the Pirates to an even faster time? Also in their heat will be Ewing, who was 5 seconds back at TCNJ but will be looking to close the gap here. Nottingham was just 2 seconds back from WWP South at TCNJ, running a 3:30.75 for 2nd place. Can their team of Mohamed Toure, Mathia Doliet, Liam Cox, and Nkemakolam Uduma get under the 3:30 barrier?
Another heat to watch is the prep schools at 4:35 PM, which features both Peddie and Lawrenceville. Peddie was the top team in the county during indoor season, and the Falcon’s lineup of Jelani Cine, Luke Chon, Baker Pott, and Dasyer Bullock ran 3:29 last month at Eastern States. Lawrenceville ran 3:32 in the winter, but their new lineup for Penn Relays – Amari Akakpo, Michael Bradley, Arunav Sarkar, and Ayodele Joa-Griffith – looks capable of topping that. Keep an eye on Bradley, who is opening his season with this race. He was the fastest 55m/200m sprinter in Mercer County this winter, but this will be just his second time running a 4x400m.
The #2 team in the county this winter was Notre Dame, who comes in with a seed time of 3:32.02. The Irish will be running three runners from that lineup – AJ Crawford, Chris Young, and Amir Mulkey – and we’ll also get to see the debut of junior transfer student Jayden Davis, who ran 51.24 in the open 400m as a sophomore.
Boys Triple Jump. The boys triple jump will start at noon, and its flight of 18 invitees includes Lawrence’s Matin Mahmoud! His big jump of 46-7.5 at New Balance Indoor Nationals was just enough to earn him the final qualifying spot. The fact that he’s on this start list shows just how amazing the senior’s trajectory has been. Last outdoor season, he was barely among the top 100 triple jumpers in New Jersey. Now he’s one of four boys representing the Garden State at the Penn Relays!
Friday
Girls 4x800m. Friday starts off with four heats of the girls 4x800m, where Lawrenceville will be the lone Mercer County representative. The Big Red is running the same line-up that won the Prep Relays in a quick 9:36 three weeks ago: Jael Gaines, Yasmin Willie, Rory Laubach, and Blair Bartlett. It may be a tall order to qualify for the 12-team final on Saturday – last year, the final qualifier was 9:18, or an average split of roughly 2:19 – but you never know! Lawrenceville has a knack for running well in big meets, and they have the individual PRs to run right pretty close to that. It’ll be fun to see what the 400m expert Gaines can do over two laps, and also what Bartlett can do when chasing down runners on the anchor leg.
Girls 4x100m. After the mid-distance girls are done, the sprinters will take the track for the 4x100m relays. As with the boys 4x100m, most Mercer County schools will be competing and laying down a standard for the rest of their season.
WWP South was the fastest Mercer County 4x100m team last year, and they ran 49.80 at this meet. Their lineup this year features almost the same team, with Adama Turay, Logan Mills, Claire Dumortier, and Anastasia Kudin. (Mills is swapping in for Sariah Hoover, who they’ll save for the 4x400m on Saturday.) This will be the season’s first major 4x100m for these girls.
Last year, Lawrenceville ran their season’s best of 49.92 at this meet. They’re returning three seniors who were on that squad (Rhianna Scott, Jael Gaines, and Sofia Swindell) and adding sophomore Blake Hatwood.
Other schools inching towards the 50-second mark are the 2nd- through 4th-place finishers at the TCNJ Invitational: Ewing (51.12), Steinert (51.26) and Lawrence (51.37). They are each lining up in Philly on Friday, so how close to 50 can they get?
Girls Shot Put. While her teammates are sprinting around Franklin Field on Friday morning, Trenton’s Sonjay Baylor-Reeves will be over at the Irving “Moon” Mondschein Throwing Complex competing in the shot put championship! Her PR of 43-5.75 from the CVC Relays in January got her into the competition as the 12th of 18 seeds. She’s thrown over 40’ a half-dozen times since then, and she’ll look to muster another big throw here against some of the best shot putters competition from up and down the East Coast (and the Caribbean).
Girls DMR Championship. WWP North got invited to the prestigious DMR Championships of America! They come in with a season’s best of 12:26, which they ran to win the Group 3 Relays during winter track, but don’t be surprised to see a faster time here as they rise to face tougher competition. They’ll take on most of the best teams in New Jersey, like Union Catholic, Oak Knoll, Manalapan, Ocean City, and Ridgewood, plus the two NXN qualifiers from New York, Bethlehem and Shenendehowa. But the Knights’ lineup of Zui Chinchalkar, Brie Davis-Owens, Sara Secora, and Allison Lee is stacked with speed and starpower, too.
Girls 3000m Championship. It was no surprise that Blair Bartlett (Lawrenceville) got an invitation to the 3000m this year, since she was invited last year and has only been running faster and faster since then – for example, a 9:32 3000m and a 10:18 Two Mile this past season. She also has another year of national-caliber, championship-style racing under her belt, and she has shown that she’s not afraid to mix it up with the best at the front of the pack. Watch for her to improve on her 13th-place finish from last year.
Saturday
Girls 4x400m. Saturday day is the girls’ turn to run 4x4s. Ewing and Robbinsville kick the day off in the first heat at 8:45, and then almost every other local school will race in separate heats over the two hours.
Watch for some fast times from these schools! There is a lot of emerging talent in the girls 4x400m. Last year, only two girls teams ran 4:15 or better during the indoor season. This past winter, we had five girls teams go at least that fast – Lawrenceville, WWP South, WWP North, Princeton, and Hopewell Valley – and Lawrence was right behind them at 4:17. Plus there’s Wilberforce, who just ran a 4:18 to win the TCNJ Invitational earlier this month. All of these schools will be racing on Saturday.
One heat to keep an eye on is the 9:13 AM heat, which will feature WWP South. They’re running their quartet of star seniors: Adama Turay, Sariah Hoover, Claire Dumortier, and Anastasia Kudin. That’s the same squad that ran 3:58 at New Balance Nationals Indoor and 3:57 at last year’s Penn Relays. Can they go even faster in this year’s edition? They enter the heat as the top seed, but they’ll be pushed by New York’s Ursuline School, which ran 3:59 at the Millrose Games in February.
The biggest race of the day – and maybe the meet – will be the prep schools 4x400m at 11:31 AM. The main showdown in this heat will be Lawrenceville vs. the clock. The Big Red team is stacked with Jael Gaines, Sofia Swindell, Yasmin Willie, and Rhianna Scott. Swindell is returning from last year’s team, but this will be the first Penn Relays 4x400m for the other three. But all of these girls have proven their ability to race national-caliber fields this past winter season, when they ran 3:50 twice.
It’s going to take something at least that special for Lawrenceville to make the final here. Out of the hundreds of American and Jamaican 4x400 teams, only nine will qualify to race in the meet’s finale, the High School Girls’ 4x400 Championship of America. That’s one of the most prestigious races of the year, and it’s also one of the hardest to qualify for. Last year the cutoff time was 3:49. Lawrenceville will likely have to hit that time with only the crowd pushing them on – they won this heat by 10 seconds last year. But still, given the talent on this Lawrenceville team, they have a legitimate shot of qualifying!