By Jack Pfeifer

The rest of the 40^th Pre meet took place on Saturday afternoon, with perfect conditions – sunny, temps in the 70s – a packed house at Hayward Field, national television. This meet is now considered the best meet of its kind in the world, up there with the legendary European meets like Bislett and the Weltklasse. Backed by Nike, Meet Director Tom Jordan does a superb job pulling together as many top-tier athletes as are available, within the IAAF Diamond League structure of alternating events each year. (This year, for example, it means the men’s 100 but not the women’s, the women’s 200 but not the men’s, and so forth.)

In the case of the steeplechase, this is the women’s turn, and the United States was ably represented by the recent Colorado graduate Emma Coburn, fresh off a world-leading 9:19 in China; the New Jersey-based Ashley Higginson, and Jamie Cheever, facing a raft of the top African runners, including all of the top five finishers at last summer’s Moscow World Championships – Lydia Chepkurui and Milcah Chemos of Kenya and the Ethiopians Sofia Assefa, Hiwot Ayalew and Etenesh Diro. One thing you quickly learn at a meet of this stature is that the fields are not the top domestics with a few internationalists thrown in for flavor, but the reverse.

Coburn ran a tremendous 9:17.84 – second-fastest by an American, behind fellow Coloradan Jenny Simpson’s AR 9:12 – but had to settle for 3^rd, behind Assefa 9:11 and Ayalew 9:12. “I was happy with the PR, obviously,” Coburn said afterward, “although I was definitely hoping to go a few seconds faster.

“The American record is still five seconds away,” she said. “That’s a lot, but obviously, that’s a goal for me.”

Higginson had opened her season in April at Princeton with a stunning 9:35 – also a world leader at that point – so this was just her second steeple of the spring and she came into it with high expectations. That is, until the first water barrier. “I had,” she said, her head turned aside with some embarrassment, “the first water jump fall of my life. I can’t believe that happened.

“I don’t know exactly how it happened. Maybe I bumped somebody. It was two and a half feet of water. I just ‘grabbed it.’ I reached out with my hands to break my fall.”

For Higginson, that took her out of the race, mentally and physically, as she fall back and ran it in, finishing 9^th in 9:50.12.

“I had a goal of running a PR,” Higginson said. “In these Diamond League races, I struggle sometimes with being behind eight or nine international girls. That’s not an excuse, but…”

She plans to run USATF Nationals in California later this month before settling into an internship in Morristown, N.J. “At Nationals, I just want to compete,” Higginson said. A Princeton graduate, she is completing her second year of law school and will intern this summer at the firm of Riker Danzig. “I have one year left at Rutgers law,” she said, but she intends to delay going directly into the professional world in order to try for the 2016 Olympic team.