A Season of Signature Performances
Eagle standouts portend golden days for track and field.
During both their indoor and outdoor seasons this year, Eastern’s men’s and women’s track and field teams have been stacking personal records, climbing all-time program lists, and leaving their coaches sounding unusually bullish about the future.
On the women’s side, the performances have been nothing short of dazzling. Sprinter Gilana Wollman has been a double threat all season, sweeping the 100m and 200m at a recent home invitational. Judith Koumedzina, meanwhile, has climbed into the top five of EWU’s all-time lists in both events, and is key part of a women’s 4x100m relay squad that has blasted to the No. 2 spot in program history.
In the hurdles, Jordyn Grady has been on a tear, setting personal bests at consecutive meets while posting a 400m hurdles time that is EWU’s second best ever. “That school record is going down soon,” says Erin Tucker, Eastern’s director of track and field and cross county.
Then there is Lexi Meyer, who perhaps delivered the signature performance of EWU’s season: an 800m effort at the OSU High Performance Invite that didn’t just break her own school record — it obliterated it by nearly two full seconds.
The men have been equally compelling. Sprinter Kris Phennicie has vaulted to Eastern’s No. 2 all-time in the 100m rankings, while Enoch Okoh, his frequent relay partner, holds the No. 4 spot. Distance runner Owen Higgins quietly moved into second place all-time in the 800m, and thrower Cort Gebbers has Tucker promising seismic events in the discus circle. “Cort is about to unload something crazy,” he says. “Stay tuned.”
If EWU’s season has a subplot that transcends the conference standings, it belongs to Madhvendra “Maddy” Shekhawat, a senior sprinter, hurdling specialist and two time All Big Sky athlete from Jaipur, India. Since his breakout season in 2025, Shekhawat has been turning heads on two continents. At Eastern, he’s been virtually unbeatable in the 60m hurdles, winning at every meet he has entered this season and posting consistent times that have India’s growing number of track and field fans paying close attention.
The stakes are clear. Shekhawat’s personal best of 13.70 seconds in the 110m hurdles sits just a few hundredths of a second from the Asian Games qualification standard — a gap that sounds negligible but is, even for elite sprint hurdlers, a real challenge. His recent successes have been understood, in both Jaipur and in Cheney, as evidence that he is closing it. The future is indeed looking bright.
“We are moving in the right direction and are on the cusp of putting together a great conference meet,” Tucker says of Maddy and the rest of his up-and-coming team. “We will fight for a ton of first-place finishes and destroy a few school records along the way.”
