The most fun part of watching a 400-meter dash race during Breigh Jones' hey-day at Austin Peay was how routinely she won—20 times as an individual across all competitions during her illustrious career, to say nothing of how frequently she helped whichever relay quartet she lined up with take the top spot. Winning, it should be noted, will always pass for what is, "the most fun," around these and many other parts.
The second-most fun part of watching Jones happened before the race, as the competitors were settling into the blocks or doing warm-up run-outs in their lanes to prepare for the next minute of frenetic action. It did not take a particularly discerning eye to notice that Jones—standing 5-4 on her best day—was a head shorter than many of the athletes she lined up alongside, who were uniformly long-legged and seemed to stride once for every two strides the Austin Peay dynamo took. She was fast, sure; so was everyone else. They don't let the pedestrian sprinters run at the Division I level.
Then they'd all settle into the blocks, the gun would go off and Jones would simply destroy the entire field, proving mostly that heart, grit and fire might be immeasurable everywhere except in the result. Maybe she didn't look like the prototypical champion in longer sprints, but where it counted and when it mattered, no one stood taller than Breigh Jones.
Her first season built slowly, from being excited just to make the travel roster for the 2012 OVC Indoor Championships to qualifying for the 2012 NCAA East Preliminary in Jacksonville that spring—not only qualifying but breaking (not for the last time) the 400-meter outdoor record and advancing to the quarterfinal round of the event.
About those 400-meter records; there was a time, not all that long ago, that they pretty much all belonged to Jones. As the dust settled on her outstanding career, before a couple other luminaries came along, learned from Austin Peay sprint guru Valerie Brown and began to challenge Jones' marks, she occupied all 10 spots of both the indoor and outdoor top-10 in the 400 in school history. This school and this program have seen a good many talented standouts in track and field through the years, but nobody so thoroughly monopolized success like Breigh Jones did for a time.
Jones spent the summer after her freshman year participating in the Junior National Championships and qualifying for the Pan American Junior Games in Colombia. She came back hungry and determined to build on the momentum from her promising freshman campaign.
Even the most hopeful observers weren't quite prepared for what came next.
By her measure, she started slow during indoor season, but rallied to snag silver in the Ohio Valley Conference Indoor Championships with what was at the time a school record. Then outdoor season began and off she went. Literally. She won five straight 400 wins in a row to start the outdoor campaign.
She just won and won and kept winning; not only finals, of which there were numerous, but just individual heats where she obliterated whoever she was up against. It wasn't just that she won, although that was certainly part of the appeal; she ripped opponents hearts out. They were beaten as soon as the heatsheet came out. Ah crap. I'm in the same heat with the Jones kid. Pick the event, if she lined up she was going to win or come close.
After breezing to an OVC title, finishing nearly a second faster than the rest of the field, Jones was back in the NCAA Preliminary round, and this time she made more history, becoming the first Governor since 2001 to advance to the NCAA Outdoor Championships. She did so in the toughest environment as well, opening her stay at the Regional finishing second in a heat that put six of its eight competitors on to the quarterfinals and then smashing the OVC record with a 52.65 in the quarters to punch her ticket to Oregon. She would finish 20th nationally in Oregon to cap quite possibly the greatest all-around individual season in Austin Peay track and field history.
She would continue to stack titles and fill her medal cabinet over the next two years and made a third regional appearance as a junior, although injuries marred her final campaign as a Gov. She would finish her Austin Peay career with 16 medals in OVC Championship competition, including five gold-medal performances. She was the 2015 OVC Outdoor Track Athlete of the Year and capped her Austin Peay career in 2016 by earning the Legends Award, given annually to Austin Peay's top graduating female student athlete because, given the previous 800 words, who else could it have plausibly been given to?
There's a through-line from Jones arriving on Austin Peay's campus in the Fall of 2012 and all the success the Govs have enjoyed since, up to and including the 2020 Ohio Valley Conference Indoor Championship. She might have been long gone from campus by that time but she was among the first and certainly one of the most meaningful building blocks that laid the foundation for everything that came after.
With her foundation of track and field excellence, it seems like it should have been impossible for Jones to fit anything else into her schedule. It was not only possible, she became one of the most involved student-athletes of her day in and around campus, serving as a Peer Mentor and the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee's Public Relations liaison while performing well enough in the classroom to earn a CoSIDA Academic All-District nod (to no one's surprise who has ever met her, she's already finished up her Master's in sport performance and psychology and will soon be Dr. Breigh Jones-Coplin with a Psy.D. in clinical psychology). She entered her senior campaign by earning one of six prestigious OVC Scholar-Athlete Awards and concluded it as both Austin Peay and the OVC's nominee for NCAA Woman of the Year.
Take notes, future student-athletes. The above? That is how you get the most out of your student-athlete experience.
