Two completely different backgrounds.
“The weather, sometimes it gets me,” said SBU senior Collinique Farrington.
“It’s nice on days like today when it’s not overwhelmingly hot, but yeah so the weather is pretty nice,” said SBU graduate student Parker Love.
Collinique Farrington is from the Freeport, Bahamas and Parker Love is from Warsaw, Missouri. Two different backgrounds with one big thing in common, putting their names all over the track record books at Southwest Baptist University.
“My coach kind of comes to me and he tells me the record and basically give me the confidence and like, you know, I could do it,” Farrington said.
“I knew that coming off the turn that I got myself set up right and then I really just opened up and just started pulling on the kids who were out in front of me,” Love said. “By the time I passed them, I knew it had to be something pretty cool, and then it came up on the scoreboard and I was like, ‘oh, yeah’.”
And when they feel confident that their time beat the previous record, they just cannot wait to see what that new time is.
“I mean I was cranking the neck the moment I came across the finish line,” Love said.
Farrington and Love are national championship qualifiers and have even earned honors like GLVC Athletes of the Year and GLVC champion.
“I know the talent that they have,” said SBU Assistant Track Coach Sterlen Paul. “It’s not every day that you’re going to have something like that happen where it is, what your male and female athletes are doing. The same type of stuff. And it’s something that I definitely give all glory to God for.”
The duo are supporting each other all throughout the indoor and outdoor season.
“I’m right in her ear whenever she’s in the blocks,” Love said. “We did that at conference this year, she said, ‘yell at me when I take off’. So I got her right in her ear whenever she took off. I’m yelling at her and she does the same to me.”
No matter the distance, both are making a home out of SBU.
“ I think creating our environment and our culture where it is you have a home away from home, that’s important,” Paul said. “I think that’s something that you know, we’ve been able to create here and hone in on.”
“It’s pretty cool, especially since just coming from a small town and being here,” Love said. “Obviously we’re not the same size as big D1 schools, so it’s pretty cool to have an awesome coach like Coach Paul and really have the ability to run as fast as we can.”
