Seton Hill's Haley Brenny goes from would-be field hockey player to NCAA track qualifier

Haley Brenny hurdles pretty well for a field hockey player.

Two weeks ago, Brenny, a senior at Seton Hill, won the women’s PSAC 400-meter hurdles title with a time of 59.81 seconds. The time was the 16th best in Division II and earned the Harrisburg-area native a spot in the NCAA championships at Colorado State-Pueblo.

It marked the second consecutive year the Seton Hill women were represented at the national meet. Last spring, Natasha Bernett placed fourth in the heptathlon and 100 hurdles at the NCAA championships.

Brenny’s meet ended Thursday in the preliminaries, when she ran 1:00.51 and placed 14th of the 22 competitors. But her journey to the national meet was gold-medal stuff.

She came to Seton Hill initially to play field hockey. She started every match of her freshman season and recorded a goal and two assists.

But the school folded the field hockey team after that season, so Brenny turned her focus to track and field. She had walked onto the track team as a freshman — “I still had a love for track, so I wanted to do that too,” she said — but there were few indications of the success she would have.

In her first go-around with the 400 hurdles, she posted a time of 1:13.

“I was at the bottom of the totem pole for my freshman year of track,” Brenny said. “It’s exciting kind of looking back and seeing where I am now.”

She slowly started to generate some success. During the 2023 indoor season, she was part of the program record-setting distance medley relay team that finished second in the PSAC championships and also ran a leg on the indoor 1,600 relay team that placed fifth in the conference.

But then came a hurdle she didn’t expect. Last season, she switched to the open 400 as her main event. She said she suddenly had a mental block about the 400 hurdles.

“I just couldn’t get myself to go fast over (the hurdles),” she said. “For some reason, it just wasn’t really clicking last year. It was really nobody’s fault. It just kind of wasn’t working out.

“And that kind of thing is so impactful for hurdles. If you have a mental block and you can’t get yourself to sprint over them, you’re kind of done in terms of how fast you can go.”

With her confidence waning, Brenny got a much-needed shot in the arm during the 2024-25 indoor season. She broke the 58-second barrier in the indoor open 400 at YSU’s season-opening meet, and, as suddenly as it appeared, the mental block was gone.

That paved the way for her PSAC title. Her winning time of 59.81 seconds in this season’s 400 hurdles final was faster than her time in the open 400 at the 2024 PSAC championships (59.82). (As a footnote, Brenny ran the 800 meters for the first — and only — time April 5 at Slippery Rock and posted a PSAC qualifying time of 2:20.55, though she did not compete in it at the conference meet.)

As she stood on top of the podium with the gold medal draped around her neck, Brenny thought back to the journey and all of its peaks and valleys. She was overcome with emotion and began to tear up.

“I was never the fastest-in-the-PSAC type of athlete,” she said. “I really had to work to get myself up there. My freshman year, I ran 1:13, compared to 59 (as a senior). That’s a big, big jump.

“When I was on top of that podium, all I was thinking about was all those hard workouts I did that made it all worth it. … It’s been such a roller coaster to get there.”