Note: One of a series of stories that take a look back at some of the many titles won by Oklahoma Christian teams and individuals through the decades. Today's story is about current OC assistant track and field coach Jeff Bennett winning the 1968 NAIA title in the 400-meter hurdles.

OKLAHOMA CITY (Oct. 15, 2020) – Jeff Bennett became an Oklahoma sports legend through his success in the decathlon, an event in which he ranked among the best in the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But before he won NAIA decathlon titles for Oklahoma Christian in 1969 and 1970 and finished fourth in the Olympic decathlon in 1972, Bennett became only the second national champion in OC history by winning another event – the 400-meter hurdles – at the NAIA Outdoor Championships in 1968.

Bennett's backstory is well-known, and not just in OC circles. From the small northeastern Oklahoma town of Vinita, he visited the Oklahoma Christian College campus only after being referred by the track and field coach at Oklahoma Baptist and committed on the spot to the founder of OC's athletic department and first track coach, Ray Vaughn Sr.

At 5-foot-8 and 145 pounds, Bennett had competed in high school, mostly in hurdles, pole vault and the long jump and on relays, but at OC, Vaughn noticed Bennett experimenting with other events after practices and suggested he try the decathlon. Despite his size – considerably smaller than most decathletes – Bennett quickly took to the 10-discipline event and posted eye-popping numbers.

While he developed as a decathlete, he also excelled in the 440-yard hurdles and pole vault. During the 1968 outdoor season, he set a meet and stadium record of 53.7 seconds in the 440-yard hurdles in the East Texas State All-College Meet on March 9 – breaking his own marks from 1967 – and won the event in 55.1 seconds at the Wichita State Relays and District Federation Meet on April 6.

At the prestigious Kansas Relays on April 19, he finished fourth in 53.4 seconds, behind only runners from Oklahoma, Nebraska and Emporia State (Kan.), then a NAIA school.

He qualified for the NAIA Outdoor Championships – to be held at the University of New Mexico Stadium in Albuquerque, N.M. – in both the pole vault and the hurdles, which was slated to be run at the metric distance of 400 meters, as the top two finishers in each event would qualify for the 1968 U.S. Olympic Trials.

Bennett entered the meet with the third-fastest 400-meter hurdles time of 52.0 seconds, behind Val Schierling of Emporia State (51.4) and Jesse Ball of Prairie View A&M (51.5).

In the event final, Ball appeared to have won the race in 50.9 seconds, but he was disqualified due to a lane violation. That decision awarded the title to Bennett, whose time of 51.3 seconds allowed him to edge John Kirry of Central Washington (51.5), Schierling (51.6) and Thomas Minor of Prairie View A&M (51.6). Bennett's title came two years after OC's Dick Gray had won the 1966 NAIA long jump championship.

Bennett said Ball "ran two hurdles in my lane. In the 400 hurdles, you've got to be paying attention and he just drifted over. By him going in my lane, he didn't run the full length of the race."

Bennett's time broke the then-standing NAIA 400-meter hurdles record of 51.4 seconds, set by Andrew McCray of North Carolina College (now known as North Carolina Central) in 1964. In OC's record book, Bennett's winning time was listed as 51.44 seconds, when accounting for differences between hand timing (used in 1968) and more precise modern electronic timing systems.

For decades – nearly half a century, in fact – no OC hurdler touched that mark. When Landon Huslig finally broke Bennett's school record by running 51.30 seconds in the 2017 Oxy Invitational in Los Angeles, Bennett – now an OC assistant coach – was among the first to congratulate him and posed for a memorable picture with him.

Huslig eventually lowered the school record to 49.67 seconds, a time he ran while winning the NCAA Division II national championship race in 2018 in Charlotte, N.C. It was OC's first national title in the event since Bennett's in 1968.

"I didn't really think it would last that long," Bennett said of his record, "but I never really thought about it. Landon really put that record out of sight."

Bennett's 1968 win qualified him for the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 400-meter hurdles, and he vividly remembers crashing over the ninth hurdle during a race at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the Trials were run. He also qualified for the Olympic Trials in the decathlon that year and finished fifth at the training camp in Lake Tahoe, Calif. – just two spots out of making the U.S. team.

"That's when the light came on," Bennett said. "I thought I could make up two spots in four years."

Bennett didn't defend his NAIA hurdles title in 1969 – he chose instead to enter the NAIA's first decathlon, which he won, then won again in 1970. In 1972, he made the U.S. Olympic team and finished fourth in the Olympic Games in Munich. He still holds the OC record in the decathlon of 8,072 points, set in 1970. It's perhaps the OC track and field record most likely to remain unbroken.

He was a charter inductee into the Oklahoma Christian Athletic Hall of Fame in 1991 and also is a member of the NAIA Hall of Fame (inducted in 1976) and the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame (inducted in 2017).