The Southeastern Conference is annually at the top of the mountain when it comes to NCAA women’s Division I collegiate track and field.
In recent years, those great programs in the South have made several trips to the St. Louis area and recruited some of the best girls’ talent that we have to offer.
The latest group of area girls who will be headed South next season are the talented trio of Samantha Levin (Ladue), Montenae Roye (Ladue) and Kendra White (McCluer North). All three of these young ladies signed national letters of intent to attend LSU last week. The LSU program is the gold standard of NCAA women’s track with 25 national titles to its credit.
Levin, Roye and White will join a growing list of St. Louis area girls who are making it happen in the SEC. Former Visual and Performing Arts star LaJada Baldwin is a senior at the University of Mississippi. One of her teammates at Ole Miss is former Villa Duchesne standout sprinter Lauren Hollingsworth. The Florida Gators have former McCluer South-Berkeley superstar Alishea Usery and her talented twin sister Ashley Usery.
The LSU program entered the St. Louis market in a big way last week by signing Levin, Roye and White, who were all summer track teammates with the Ladue Lightning Track Club. Last summer, the Lightning won the USA Track and Field Youth National Championship in the Young Women’s Division with Levin, Roye and White being instrumental in the club bringing that national title back home.
Levin is the defending Missouri Class 4 state champion in the 800-meter run. She is a stellar performer in any event, from the short sprints to the long distances and everything in between. Levin and Roye are currently ranked nationally in the 400 and 800 in the national indoor rankings this winter. Both Roye and White were top three finishers in the 400-meter dash at last year’s Class 4 state championships.
The St. Louis girls have been representing the area well in their SEC careers. Baldwin is currently a senior at Ole Miss. She has been an NCAA Indoor All-American and an All-SEC performer during her career. Alishea Usery has been a fixture on the Gators’ sprint relays and the 400 during her career while Ruff is making an immediate impact as a freshman at Tennessee. She won the 800-meter run in her first collegiate competition at the University of Kentucky Indoor Invitational in January. The Usery sisters and Ruff were instrumental figures in McCluer South-Berkeley’s four-peat state championship performance from 2007-2010. Those three athletes, along with Hollingsworth, were part of several national championship performances with the Blues Track Club during the summer track seasons of recent past.
To see our young girls of the STL get this kind of love from the powerful programs of the SEC speaks volumes of the talent that is here in the area. Not only to they perform like stars during the high school season where the weather is not exactly ideal in the Midwest, but the girls take it up several notches in the summer time when they can really display their talent against the best athletes in the country. It is those performances that bring the prime-time programs into their living rooms for recruiting visits.
Keep up the good work, young ladies.
