PHILADELPHIA, Pa.—Junior sprinter Danielle Burns (Phoenix, Ariz.) started off three days of competition for Villanova at the 125^th Penn Relays on a strong note, as she tallied a sixth place finish in the 400 meter hurdles at Franklin Field on Thursday morning.  Burns also ran the third leg of the 4x100 meter relay later in the day as the Wildcats qualified for the Eastern final of the event on Friday afternoon. 
 
Villanova lined up in the preliminary heats of the 4x100 meter relay for only the third time in the last 14 years at the Penn Relays.  The lineup of sophomore Trudy-Ann Williamson (Kingston, Jamaica), sophomore Sarah Jones (Sewell, N.J.), Burns and sophomore Jennifer Barbour (Middletown, Conn.) recorded the fifth-fastest time in school history with a mark of 46.73.
 
Although the relay is one of the more seldom run events for the Wildcats and is often worked on by the team only late in the season prior to the BIG EAST Championships, the result of Thursday's heats was hardly a surprising one.  Williamson is the school record holder in the 100 meters.  The trio of Burns, Williamson and Jones were in the Villanova lineup for the 4x100 relay at last year's BIG EAST meet, and all three are off to strong starts individually in the 2019 outdoor season. 
 
The time of 46.73 was good for 21^st place out of 66 competing teams, and the Wildcats now advance to an Eastern final race on Friday at 1:02 p.m.  The top nine teams overall in the preliminaries qualified for the championship race and the next nine teams moved on to the college section.  From there, the next tine teams from eastern schools were slotted into the Eastern final.
 
Burns was the first Villanova athlete on the track for the second straight year.  She competed in the 400 meter hurdles at 10 a.m. and recorded a time of 1:00.33 to finish sixth out of 52 competitors.  It is five spots higher than where she finished last year, while the time she posted is the second-fastest of her career.  Burns broke one minute for the first time earlier this year when she ran 59.99 at the Hurricane Alumni Invitational in Miami.
 
Also on the Wildcats schedule on Thursday was the college championship in the javelin and the college section of the pole vault to go along with the Championship of America distance medley relay and a pair of races during distance night.