Penn Relays 2025 Recap: Day 1
The first day of the Penn Relays is in the books! Temperatures were pretty hot for April, but that just made it a great day for sprinting – and fortunately today’s main events were the boys 4x100m and 4x400m. A dozen Mercer County schools took advantage of the conditions and brought the heat on the track. Here’s a recap of the top performances.
Don’t forget to check out the Mercer County Penn Relays Preview as a guide for the rest of this week’s races!
Boys 4x100m
The Allentown sprinters (Cedric Mbachu, Matt Woode, Scott Jordan, and Gavin Alvarez) are on fire this April. Last Saturday, they chopped a full second off their school record with a 43.05. Today, they cut off another half-second with a 42.47! And they did it with an emphatic performance, winning their heat by a good margin after Alvarez powered away from St. Vincent Grammar on the anchor leg. Their time was the 36th fastest of the day (out of 625 total teams) and the 7th best among New Jersey schools.
(The four senior Redbirds got an excellent profile by Kyle Franko in the Trentonian: Penn Relays: Allentown boys set new record in 4×100 with first sub-43 time in school history.)
In other heats, WWP South (Aydun Hines, Eihiko Okamoto, Julius Kinsler, and Josiah Cureton) went sub-44 for the second time this season, running 43.83 to finish 2nd in their heat. Peddie (Luke Chon, Joey Gaston, Dasyer Bullock, Jelani Cine) also took 2nd in their heat, crossing the line in a season’s best of 44.02. Next best from Mercer County was Trenton Central (Gamaliel Sheppard, Alex Castrada, Jonel Lince, Daryl Crawey), who ran 44.43 and got the added bonus of winning their heat.
Other teams to go under 45 seconds for the first time this year were Hamilton West (44.88) Nottingham (44.92), and Ewing (44.96), with Princeton (45.02) also right there. Looks like we can expect some tight races at the upcoming county meets!
Boys 4x400m
WWP South (Josiah Cureton, Aydun Hines, Sean Maina, and Julius Kinsler) came into this race as the county favorite, and they delivered big time – they ran 3:24.98 to win their heat! Cureton, Hines, and Maina split 51.85, 50.81, and 53.66 to keep the Pirates at the front the whole time, and then Kinsler left their nearest competitor in the dust with a 48.68 anchor leg. All four boys ran faster than they did at the TCNJ Invitational, giving them a 4-second season’s best. Their heat win even sent them home with a nice bronze plaque!
Another top team that showed a big improvement at the Penn Relays was Peddie (Baker Pott, Dasyer Bullock, Luke Chon, and Jelani Cine). They ran 3:25.71 – their fastest this school year by 3 seconds – to take 2nd place in the prep school heat, behind Friends Central but just ahead of some nearby prep rivals like Hill and Mercerburg. Peddie got a very fast split of 49.70 from their anchor Cine. The only person in the heat who split faster than Cine was actually Ayodele Joa-Griffith, whose 49.14 anchor leg propelled Lawrenceville to a 6th place finish in 3:29.04. That Big Red squad (Amari Akakpo, Michael Bradley, Arunav Sarkar, and Joa-Griffith) became just the third Mercer County school to go under 3:30 this year.
Another team that impressed was Princeton (Andrew Foreman, Kyle Carr, Yi-Tian Xiong, Fletcher Harrison), who finished 3rd in their heat with a 3:30.18. That’s their fastest time in three years, and it’s six seconds faster than their best from this past winter. Nottingham (Liam Cox, Nkemakolam Uduma, Mathias Doliet, Mohamed Toure) also got some bronze medals after running 3:31.17 for 3rd place in their heat.
Notre Dame (Max Whittle, Matt Ryba, Amir Mulkey, and Jayden Davis) also brought home some hardware after winning their heat in 3:32.90. They prevailed in an exciting finish that saw them hold off Hempfield (PA) by just .16 seconds.
Boys Individual Events
Sean Wilton (Princeton), who was the first Mercer County boy in 12 years to compete in the shot put at the Penn Relays, finished with a season’s best throw of 57-0.25. That carried him to 12th overall and 5th among the nine New Jersey throwers.
Matin Mahmoud (Lawrence) exceeded expectations in the boys triple jump, where he took 9th in a season’s best of 46-0.5. Despite being the last seed to get into the competition, he ended up being the only New Jersey boy to make the final.