CLEMSON, S.C.—Senior triple jumper Malik Cunningham (Kingston, Jamaica) had a milestone day in his latest strong outing at the Tiger Paw Invite on Saturday morning. Cunningham recorded a jump over 16 meters for the first time in his career and past one of the Villanova all-time greats for second place on the program's performance list in the triple jump.
 
This is the second straight week that Cunningham has extended his lifetime best in his signature event. On his sixth and final jump of the day at the Clemson Indoor Track & Field Complex he registered a mark of 16.12 meters to finish third out of 25 competitors. That distance is one centimeter longer than the mark of 16.11 meters that Jermaine Deans recorded at the IC4A Championship on March 8, 1998.
 
Deans was a three-time BIG EAST champion and a seven-time All-BIG EAST performer in the jumps during his career and had been at No. 2 on the Wildcats all-time performance list in the triple jump since the 1998 indoor season. The year that he recorded his distance of 16.11 meters Deans was named the Outstanding Field Performer at the BIG EAST Championships.
 
Saturday's performance by Cunningham made him the first Villanova athlete since Deans to record a jump longer than 16 meters. Cunningham's distance of 16.12 meters is the fourth-longest indoors by a Wildcats athlete, trailing only three longer jumps by school record holder Nate Cooper during the 1978 ad 1979 indoor campaigns.
 
In the second of two flights of the triple jump on Saturday morning, Cunningham fouled on his first two attempts before measuring a jump of 15.89 meters on his third time down the runway. That put him into third place in the competition and advanced him to the final for three more attempts, and the distance of 15.89 meters was already a personal best for Cunningham after he established his previous top mark of 15.79 meters just one week ago at the Columbia Challenge.
 
Cunningham had fallen to fourth place going into the final round of jumps by the nine athletes in the final before unfurling his biggest jump yet on his last attempt. In addition to leading the BIG EAST in the triple jump this season by a margin of nearly two meters, Cunningham is now tied for 11^th on the NCAA Division I Indoor Qualifying List. The top 16 declared athletes in each event will be selected for the NCAA Championships next month.