Taylor Named Year’s Top Track Collegian

On the Friday of her NCAA-winning 55.88-second performance in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles, Harvard women’s track co-captain Brenda Taylor was informed of an additional piece of good news.

Taylor has earned the Honda Award for the nation’s most outstanding female athlete in collegiate track and field. Out of the thousands of competitors in over 20 track and field events, Taylor was deemed the most worthy of the award by a 12-member nationwide panel.

“Looking at everyone here at NCAAs, even being here is an honor, so this award means a lot to me,” Taylor said. “I’ve worked so hard. I’ve given my life to track and my teammates.”

Each member of the panel independently ranked their top eight choices to determine the winner. The criteria for selection included leadership abilities, academic excellence and community service in addition to superior athletic skills.

The Honda Awards have been awarded to the nation’s top female collegiate athletes for 25 years in 12 NCAA-sponsored sports. The award is not offered in several women’s sports in which Harvard has been perennially competitive at the national level, such as crew, squash and ice hockey.

Taylor is the first Harvard athlete ever to win a Honda award, and by doing so, she is now eligible to win the Broderick Cup, given to the collegiate woman athlete of the year.

According to Harvard Coach Frank Haggerty, who was a member of the 12-member panel that decided the award, the two factors that made the difference in Taylor’s selection were her highly visible nation-best performance at Penn Relays in April, and the diverse number of events in which she represented Harvard year after year.

“They recognized that over her time at Harvard she had done a number of different events, and obviously at a very high level,” Haggerty said. “They had to be impressed with that.”

In a typical Crimson championship meet, Taylor ran three individual events and one or two relays—and won nearly all of them. She graduates as the school record holder in the 400 hurdles, the 100-meter high hurdles, the 100-meter dash, the 60-meter high hurdles and the 60-meter dash.

“I guess I have been a two-year captain and a team player,” Taylor said. “I’m not like the typical athlete who focuses on their one event.”

One of the great ironies of Taylor’s career is that despite being the fastest 400 hurdler in the history of the Heptagonal Games Association, Taylor graduates with Navy’s Joanna Helm still holding the Heptagonal meet record at 58.44 seconds.

But that lack of a meet record is largely the result of the sacrifice she gave for her teammates.

In this year’s Outdoor Heptagonal Meet, Taylor ran in the 200-meter dash instead of the 400 hurdles because the Crimson had a greater chance of displacing meet favorite Brown in the 200-meter dash.

During the 2000 Outdoor Heptagonal meet, Taylor reaggravated her injured hamstring while running the 100-meter dash. Even with the pulled hamstring, she still ran the 400 hurdles, placed second behind Helm and earned eight points for her team.

The Honda Awards ceremony will be held on June 11 in Salt Lake City, where the Broderick Cup winner will also be announced.

—Staff writer David R. DeRemer can be reached at remer@fas.harvard.edu.