Jarret Eaton already held the fastest 60-meter hurdles time in the nation. He already held the record for the fastest time at the Horace Ashenfelter III Indoor Track at Penn State.

But as he ran in the finals of the Penn State Invitational Jan. 28, he did it again.

In just 7.49 seconds, the blur of orange wearing a distinctive white headband owned the 60 meters and broke his records. He set a new personal best. He set a new facility record. He set a new fastest time in the nation.

Eaton has the track and field world buzzing. Yet the buzz around the Syracuse campus isn’t as loud.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Eaton said. ‘It shouldn’t be just me if I get publicity. It should be the team as a whole. Sometimes it overshadows the other success on the team.’

Eaton is a contender to do something unheard of for the Orange track and field program: become a national champion.

In Eaton’s first meet of the season at the Cornell Upstate Challenge in Ithaca, the hurdler set a school record in the 60-meter hurdles and set the bar for his competitors by posting the best time in the nation. He topped that the next weekend with his record time in State College, Pa. The 7.49-second time at the Penn State Invitational is the fastest collegiate time since 1997 and just .02 seconds behind the all-time collegiate record held by former Wisconsin hurdler Reggie Torian. Though Syracuse head coach Chris Fox has brought the SU cross country program to prominence in recent years, the track and field team has been far from elite, making Eaton’s success a pleasant surprise.

Eaton has a chance to be a Syracuse legend. But had a few things been slightly different, he would not be in this position.

Eaton was a track and field state champion and a football star at Abington Heights High School in Clarks Summit, Pa. He wanted to continue both sports, but found during the recruiting process that coaches at Division-I programs weren’t sold.

So he found himself at West Chester (Pa.) University, a Division-II school where he could play both football and run for the track and field team.

‘I loved football just as much as I love track,’ Eaton said. ‘My high school coach was able to get me to go to West Chester, and I was able to start and play football, and then I ended up essentially walking onto the track team because my football coach let me.’

Eaton starred immediately at West Chester. It wasn’t long before he and his coaches realized he had Division-I talent as a hurdler.

He decided to put his football career behind and transferred to Syracuse after his freshman year.

‘If I wanted to play football I wouldn’t have left West Chester,’ said Eaton, now a graduate student. ‘… My mindset was on track, and I was going to do track. It was a bit of a betrayal if I would have done Syracuse football after leaving West Chester.’

In his first-ever meet at Syracuse, at the SU Welcome in 2009, he ran an NCAA championship qualifying time in the 55-meter hurdles. Two weeks later, at the Penn State National Open in State College, he ran an NCAA championship qualifying time in the 60-meter hurdles.

That race soon became his staple.

Eaton traveled to College Station, Texas, for the NCAA Indoor Championship in March 2009. But his time of 7.92 seconds in the preliminaries wasn’t good enough for him to qualify and advance further.

As a junior, Eaton continued to leave his mark. At the New Balance Collegiate Invitational in New York City in February 2010, Eaton once again qualified for the NCAA championship. He also set a school record with a 7.68-second time in the 60-meter hurdles.

But a month later at the NCAA Indoor Championship in Fayetteville, Ark., Eaton ran nearly two full tenths of a second slower and finished just 16th.

‘All that shows is just that, in the grand scheme of things, times you run early in the season don’t mean anything, and I think Jarret knows that,’ SU assistant coach Dave Hegland said. ‘I think it’s great for him to run real fast early. Obviously, it’s great for us. It’s nice he set a school record, but unless you can go to the national championships and do it on that day, no one’s going to remember those times.’

After the disappointment in Fayetteville, Eaton redshirted last season as a senior. He had some minor injuries and felt that having another year would allow him to make major strides. But it also meant he would be running his final season during an Olympic qualifying year.

So far, it has paid off.

‘A year of growth, a year of maturity, a year of hard work, that all pays off for athletes,’ Fox said. ‘Look at Scoop Jardine, it’s the same kind of thing for him. He’s a fifth-year guy. A fifth year makes a big difference.

‘He got to work on his technique, he got to work on his strength, he hit the weight room hard and he’s a bigger, better, stronger athlete.’

In his first meet, Eaton came out with a vengeance. He broke his own school record with a 7.61 in the 60-meter hurdles. He broke it again with the 7.49 at Penn State, the time that still sits as the best in the nation.

Of course, that won’t mean anything if he can’t turn that into a first-place finish at the NCAA Indoor Championships this March in Nampa, Idaho.

‘It would be huge for us,’ Fox said. ‘It’s a rare opportunity. He’s one of the guys that can do it at nationals if everything goes right — knock on wood to stay healthy. It would be as big as anything to happen in 10 years for this program.’

With the fastest time in 15 years in the 60-meter hurdles, Eaton’s goal of a national championship certainly an objective within reach.

And if he can do that, it would do wonders for the program. Nothing rivals in importance and value to producing a national champion.

‘It’s the start of something here,’ Eaton said. ‘My coach is a great hurdle coach, and coach Fox is a great cross country coach, and track and field as a whole is on the rise. It’s not the same program as it was 10 years ago. We have great coaching, we have great talent here as a team. … We’re on the up and up.’

dbwilson@syr.edu

Published on February 14, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact David: dbwilson@syr.edu | @DBWilson2