NEW ORLEANS—Senior sprinter and middle distance runner McKenna Keegan (West Grove, Pa.) was named the Mid-Atlantic Region Women's Track Athlete of the Year and head coach Gina Procaccio earned her eighth career Mid-Atlantic Region Women's Head Coach of the Year honor in an announcement made by the United States Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association (USTFCCCA) on Friday afternoon. Keegan swept the indoor and outdoor accolades as the top track performer in the region this year, becoming only the second Villanova athlete ever to do so. She was named the Mid-Atlantic Women's Track Athlete of the Year for the indoor season earlier this year.
 
Keegan is headed to Eugene, Ore. next week for an extended stay which will include competing first in the NCAA Championships and later in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials which begin on June 19. It is the second time in her career that Keegan is an outdoor NCAA Championships qualifier in her signature event, the 800 meters. Her time of 2:01.25 in the national quarterfinal heats at the NCAA East Preliminary in Jacksonville last weekend was the fastest time in school history in a race that occurred during the collegiate calendar. Keegan automatically qualified for the national championships with the fifth-fastest time in the 12-year history of the East regional meet.
 
The accomplishments for Keegan this season, both in the 800 meters and as part of the Wildcats sprint group, have been astounding considering that prior to March 26 she had not run an outdoor race since the end of the 2018 season. She redshirted the 2019 outdoor and 2020 indoor collegiate seasons before seeing the 2020 outdoor track & field season cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. She did run for Villanova in cross country (2019) and indoors (2021) since qualifying for the NCAA Championships as a sophomore in 2018, but has described outdoor track & field as her favorite of the seasons.
 
Keegan has made good on every chance she has had to be on the track over the past two months; she has lowered her lifetime PR in the 800 meters by more than three seconds, won a BIG EAST title and been an automatic qualifier through each of the first two rounds of the national championships and has also run the fastest known 4x400 meter relay split in school history. She won the first two outdoor BIG EAST titles of her career last month when she was the individual champion of the 800 meters and anchored the Wildcats to a conference title in the 4x400 meter relay. Keegan posted times of 2:03.59 and 2:01.25 in her two 800 meter races at the NCAA East Preliminary last week. The latter time puts her second on the all-time Villanova performance list in the 800 meters, trailing only school record holder Debbie Grant who recorded times of 2:00.47 and 2:00.82 during the 1987 summer season at the Olympic Festival and the TAC Championships, respectively.
 
Earlier in the outdoor season Keegan recorded a personal best time of 54.50 in the 400 meters at the Temple Invite on April 9. That puts her sixth on the Wildcats performance list in the 400 meters to go along with her efforts on the team's 4x400 relay. Villanova ran the seventh-fastest 4x400 race in school history when it posted a time of 3:38.78 at the Philadelphia Metropolitan Collegiate Invitational on April 24. Keegan anchored that relay and had a split of 52.67 on the final leg of the race. Although records for relay splits are incomplete in the Wildcats record book, Keegan's mark is the fastest known split in a 4x400 race. Michelle Bennett had three faster splits (52.0, 52.1, 52.3) on distance medley relay races during her Villanova career. The time of 3:38.78 for the Wildcats at the "Philly Mets" meet earned the team a spot in the NCAA East Preliminary. This year was the first time since 2011 that Villanova had a relay team qualify for the regional meet.
 
Keegan joins five-time NCAA champion Sheila Reid as the only Wildcats to be the USTFCCCA Mid-Atlantic Region Women's Track Athlete of the Year both indoors and outdoors in the same year. Reid achieved that distinction in 2011, while former Villanova standout Emily Lipari was a two-time winner during the 2013-14 academic year when she was the top Mid-Atlantic Region athlete in cross country during the fall and outdoors during the spring.
 
Procaccio has been the USTFCCCA Mid-Atlantic Region Head Coach of the Year eight times during her tenure leading the Wildcats, including twice outdoors in 2015 and again this season. She guided Villanova to its third consecutive BIG EAST title last month and led a Wildcats team which qualified 19 individual athletes and one relay squad for the NCAA East Preliminary meet. Keegan and junior high jumper Sanaä Barnes (Keller, Texas) each advanced from the East regional meet to the national championships. Villanova also saw the school records in six different events broken at least once during the current outdoor season.
 
At the conference championships on May 14-15 the Wildcats scored 197.5 points to defeat runner-up Connecticut by 40 points. Villanova produced individual champions in the 400 meter hurdles (Danielle Burns); the 800 meters (Keegan); the 1500 meters (Anna Helwigh); the 3000 meter steeplechase (Lydia Olivere); the 5000 meters (Olivere), the discus (Grayce French); and the javelin (Taryn Ashby) in addition to winning the 4x400 meter relay. The team's success across the board at the BIG EAST meet led to 26 All-BIG EAST honors and podium finishes (top-three) in 15 of the 20 events that made up the meet program.
 
Keegan, Helwigh, Olivere, French, Ashby and junior multi-event athlete Liv Morgan all broke school records during the 2021 outdoor campaign. Helwigh briefly held the school record in the 3000 meter steeplechase after posting a time of 10:05.86 at the Virginia Challenge in April, while Olivere took back ownership of the record with times of 10:03.89 at the Philly Mets and 9:57.34 at the BIG EAST Championships which earned her a second straight appearance in the national quarterfinal heats of the steeplechase at the NCAA East Preliminary meet.
 
French broke the school record in both the shot put (14.95 meters) and the discus (52.35 meters) at the BIG EAST Championships, while Ashby and Morgan eclipsed their own school records in the javelin and the heptathlon. Ashby broke her own mark three times this season, with the most recent standard of 50.69 meters being set at the UNF Invite on April 30. Morgan set the current mark in the heptathlon with a score of 5,149 points in an All-BIG EAST performance at the conference meet.
 
Procaccio has guided Villanova to winning five of the last seven outdoor BIG EAST titles and being the runner-up in each of the two seasons in did not finish atop the podium. Since the current alignment of the conference has been in place (beginning with the 2013 cross country season), the Wildcats have won 12 team titles (five indoor track & field, five outdoor track & field, two cross country) including back-to-back conference "triple crowns" during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years when Villanova swept the cross country, indoor and outdoor crowns.