VILLANOVA, Pa.—There was no specific point during the final day of competition at the BIG EAST Outdoor Track & Field Championships presented by Jeep on Saturday afternoon when Villanova suddenly made a giant leap in the team standings.  What did happen however, is the Wildcats scored points in every one of the 19 events they entered (out of 22 in the meet program).  Villanova won five individual titles and one relay crown at the conference meet, made the awards podium (top-three finish) a total of 14 times, and when the dust settled saw its senior class come forward to accept the BIG EAST team trophy for the eighth time overall and the first in four years. 
 
"When you see a team effort like that in track & field, it's really like an orchestra trying to put a concert together, and it's all the different parts from the jumps and the field events to the sprints and distance," Wildcats head coach Marcus O'Sullivan said.  "There are 22 events and each team has on average a group of about 35 guys that are coming together for a clash, and at the end of the meet a spread of eight points is not a whole lot.  It was great to watch the whole thing come together for the various components that went into it.  It gave our men and women an opportunity to feel this great team concept, which doesn't happen that often in our sport.  I just told the guys how much they have grown over the last 48 hours, and it's something they can take with them for the rest of their lives." 
 
O'Sullivan and the rest of the Villanova coaching staff were voted the Coaching Staff of the Year by their peers.  The championship trophy was accepted by the nine members of the Wildcats senior class.  After winning individual titles in the high jump, the pole vault and the javelin in action on Friday afternoon, Villanova added championships in the 1500 meters, the 400 meter hurdles and the 4x800 meter relay on Saturday at Icahn Stadium.
 
Sophomore sprinter Keegan Hughes (Malvern, Pa.) successfully defended his BIG EAST title in the hurdles and junior distance runner Casey Comber (Maple Glen, Pa.) sensationally came from behind on the final straightaway to win the 1500 meters.  He also anchored the 4x800 relay team to a victory, with sophomore Jacob Bonanotte (Barrington, Ill.), senior Ville Lampinen (Vantaa, Finland) and junior Logan Wetzel (Saline, Mich.) running ahead of him.
 
"Of all the teams I have watched something like this come together for, this is going to be one of my favorites," O'Sullivan said.  "To watch this happen, for me as a coach was very rewarding.  In my 21 years this was one of the more enjoyable team performances I have watched, and that's because of how it all unfolded.  It was seeing individuals that were all stepping up, and doing it collectively from all the different events."
 
Villanova finished with a winning score of 198 points, eight more than runner-up Marquette in the field of seven teams.  It was the smallest margin of victory in the men's team race at the outdoor meet since 2011, giving added weight to each of the individual performances O'Sullivan spoke of. 
 
Comber got Saturday's running events off to a rousing start, as he made up a sizable gap in the final 200 meters and overtook Johnny Leverenz from Butler just a few strides before the finish line.  His winning time was 3:59.59, with Leverenz three-tenths of a second behind him and Wetzel just another hundredth of a second off the pace in third place. 
 
Senior sprinter Harry Purcell (Dublin, Ireland) had a similarly too-close-to-call race in the final of the 800 meters, where he finished second in 1:50.54 in a photo finish that necessitated the electronic timing system going down to the thousandths of a second to separate Kenneth Rowe of Georgetown and Purcell. 
 
The next race after the 800 meters was the 400 meter hurdles.  Hughes lowered his personal best time in the hurdles for the second time in the last three weeks.  He crossed the finish line in 52.37, winning by more than half a second and improving on the time of 52.68 he recorded at the Penn Relays last month.  Junior Konrad Bayer (Naperville, Pa.) was eighth with a time of 55.34. 
 
From the hurdles it was on to the final of the 200 meters.  Sophomore sprinters Amir Brock (Egg Harbor Twp., N.J.) and Richie Bush (Lawnside, N.J.), who had finished fourth and fifth in the 400 meters exactly an hour earlier, each scored again in their second final of the day. This time it was Bush in fourth place and Brock in sixth as the Wildcats made good on another opportunity to get points from multiple runners in a race. 
 
The last individual event on the track was the 5000 meters, in which junior Andrew Marston (Wayne, Pa.) was the runner-up in 14:18.89.  Graduate student Nathan Rodriguez (Tempe, Ariz.) came in fifth (14:33.66) and sophomore Martin Barr (Skokie, Ill.) was sixth (14:34.83).
 
Villanova had a nine-point lead over Marquette after the 5000 meters and increased the margin to 14 points with its win in the 4x800 meter relay.  At that point in time, competition in the discus had ended but results and points had not yet been updated.  Marquette scored 19 points in the discus, but juniors Chika Nwachukwu (Lawrence, N.J.) and Jadyn Anczarski (Ringtown, Pa.) came in third and fourth in the event.  They combined for 11 points and the Wildcats mostly held serve with a 181-175 lead and just the 4x400 meter relay and the triple jump still to be scored. 
 
A team consisting of Brock, Bush, Purcell and Hughes came in third in the 4x400 relay with a time of 3:12.30, while Marquette finished sixth and was more than six seconds behind Villanova at the finish line.  That extended the point margin back to nine points, all but clinching the title for the Wildcats just as results from the triple jump were being handed in. 
 
An athlete from Marquette won the triple jump by a healthy margin over the rest of the field, but freshman Malik Cunningham (St. Andrew, Jamaica) came in third and sophomore Vincent Sengelmann was fourth as Villanova did enough to come away with its third outdoor trophy in the last six seasons. 
 
"When we got back after yesterday, we analyzed the scores and saw where we were picking up points," O'Sullivan said.  "After that first day you could sense the momentum was there, and there was a shift in ideology as far as what we can do.  It didn't feel like there was pressure to get it done.  It felt like it just started to unfold as a collective effort."