GENEVA, Ohio —The qualifying time for a woman to make the field for 800 Meter Run the 2025 NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships Championships was the fastest in the history of the championships by nearly a second. Against this powerhouse field, Eastern University senior Hailey Shreffler finished fourth in her prelim and 12th overall to earn Second-Team All-America honors in her final race for the Eagles.

Shreffler, the 2025 MAC Outdoor Track and Field Track Athlete of the Year reached the Championships with a program-record  2:09.87 one week after winning both the 1500 and the 800 at the MAC Championships. That time, which would have had her seeded 14th last year made her the 19th seed in the field. Every runner in the field had run below 2:10 in her career.

After watching the first heat, Shreffler took the track with a couple familiar faces and another runner with an interesting connection.

Tanise Thornton-Fillyaw from Goucher was the National Runner-up last spring and Elizabethtown's Kelly Oester won the event at this year's Indoor National Championships. Despite the geographic proximity and several common meets, Shreffler last raced against Oester at Millersville in 2024. Shreffler and Thornton-Fillyaw were in the same prelim at the 2024 Outdoor National Championships. The two also raced at Johns Hopkins last April. That race was the first time Shreffler broke 2:20 in the event.

The third runner of consequence, Ellie Rising from George Fox, was a runner in the top 22 last spring that opted to only run in the 1500 at Nationals. That choice allowed Shreffler to move off the bubble and into the 2024 Championships.

That trio set a hard pace out of the gate. Rising pressed the pace and the first group came through with a gap of just under a second on the rest of the field.  The gap grew over the third 200 meters as three each pushed for the two automatic qualifying spots into the finals. Shreffler closed the gap over the final 200 to finish fourth in the race. Her time, 2:12.38, was a second and a half faster than her time in the 2024 Championships and was good enough for 12th in the field. By picking up those seven spots over her seed, Shreffler earns All-America Honors. She is the second Eastern woman to earn All-America recognition at the Outdoor Championships. Mary Bernotas earned the honor in the 2021 Championships.

The All-America Honor rounds out a stellar senior year for the Biochemistry major who graduated last week with high honors. Shreffler earned the 2024-25 Eastern Female Athlete of the Year Honors at the Nesties. She earned eight All-Region Honors in Cross Country and Indoor and Outdoor Track and Field this year.