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Track and Field Greatest Govs | Sheena Gooding

June 05, 2020

As you've likely heard, we don't have any live-action contests to cover at LetsGoPeay.com right now. What we do have is free time; oodles and oodles of free time. Enough free time to swap oodles of emails with various people who would know to create a snapshot of the best athletes in Austin Peay track and fieldl history. Today, let's wrap up the week by talking about the versatile international standout who could literally pick which event she wanted to be amazing at.

Sheena Gooding could do anything.

In Ohio Valley Conference competition, Gooding earned 14 gold medals—eight straight 800-meter run titles, with a pair of indoor mile championships and four relay titles. That's not just an Austin Peay record, that's a career anyone who has ever competed in the OVC can be envious of.

But Gooding wasn't just restricted to competing for league glory. Twice, she was a qualifier for the NCAA Indoor Championships, and twice she qualified for the Outdoor Championships, but it was at the 2001 NCAA Outdoors that Gooding's 2:04.95 mark in the championship heat earned her the only known NCAA Division I Track and Field All-American honor in program history.

Gooding still holds Austin Peay records in both the indoor and outdoor 800, but her sphere of influence could be even broader than realized. At the turn of the century, with meet results largely undigitized, the historical record of Gooding's results are confined largely to OVC and NCAA appearances and the odd school record of note. Yet even with those knowledge gaps, she maintains a presence across the Austin Peay record books—four of the top-10 800 runs indoors, three more in outdoor, five in the indoor mile and another in outdoor 1500. Upon her graduation, she held four individual school records and shared three more relay marks, with six of those honors standing until 2014 and the aforementioned 800 records still unbeaten today.

In 2001, Gooding helped lead a short-handed Austin Peay squad to the OVC Indoor Championship, a distinction the Govs wouldn't earn again until earlier this year. She earned OVC Indoor Athlete of the Year, the first of two postseason honors bestowed upon her by the league.

If that weren't enough, Gooding spent her falls running cross country; the mid-distance dynamo was so good at it she was first-team All-OVC in 2001 after a second-team honor the year before. And she did all that while also serving as SAAC President and twice earning CoSIDA Academic All-District honors for her work in the classroom. In 2008, she was enshrined the Austin Peay Athletics Hall of Fame.

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