COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.— Colorado Mesa University senior Teo Casados has been named as the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference's Men's Outdoor Track Athlete of the Year while Aidan Brownell was named as the league's Co-Freshman of the Year, it was announced early Monday afternoon in the RMAC's end-of-season awards release.
 
Those awards and the other major awards were determined by a vote of the conference's head coaches, who were not permitted to vote for their own athletes nor for themselves in the RMAC Coach of the Year category.
 
In conjunction with the major awards announcement, the 2025 All-RMAC teams were also officially announced, but determined purely on results of last month's RMAC Championship meet in Golden.
 
The Mavericks had nine men win a combined 12 All-RMAC honors, including five first team honors, and placed fourth in the final team standings with 71 points.
 
Casados, a native of Thornton, Colorado, won both the 100 and 200-meter titles to earn a pair of First Team All-RMAC honors that go to the first, second and third place finishers in each individual event as well as to the members of the winning relay teams.  He also earned a Second Team All-RMAC honor in the 4x100-meter relay as the anchor leg on CMU's runner-up squad.
 
Casados finished the 200 meters in a wind-aided 20.35 seconds (20.42-altitude adjusted) and will represent the Mavs in that event at this week's NCAA Division II Championships in Pueblo as the No. 3 overall seed.  That time is the fastest all-conditions mark in program history by a substantial margin.
 
Casados also set an official school-record time of 10.43 seconds in the 100 meters at the conference championships.
 
He is the first Maverick to ever earn the RMAC Track Athlete of the Year honor while extending the Mavs' major awards streak to three years after Dawson Heide and Zace Buckhold won the 2023 and 2024 Field Athlete of the Year honors in the past two years.
 
Meanwhile, Brownell joins 2024 co-indoor and 2024 sole outdoor Miller Jones, as the only Maverick men to have ever bee named as the RMAC Freshman of the Year.  He shared this year's honor with Chadron State's Trace Hanchett. 
 
The LaSalle, Colorado native took fifth in the 400-meter hurdles and seventh in the 110-meter hurdles at the RMAC Championships and picked up a Second Team All-RMAC honor in the 400-meter discipline.  He then went on to set a season-best and NCAA Division II Championship provisional qualifying time of 52.35 seconds at the Franson Last Chance Meet to punctuate his season.  That time ranks Brownell second in program history and fourth on the RMAC's season-long performance list.
 
He also turned in an all-conditions season-best time of 14.78 seconds in the 100 hurdles and ranks sixth in program history with his wind-legal best of 14.90 from the preliminary heats at the RMAC Championships.
 
The Maverick men also had three other First Team All-RMAC honorees.  Izaak Siefken and Seth Sherwood both earned such honors in the javelin throw, which Siefken won ahead of Sherwood, who finished third.
 
Antone Higgs earned a first team plaudit thanks to a third place finish in the triple jump.  He also claimed a second team honor with a fourth place finish in the long jump and will represent the Mavs in that discipline at the NCAA Championships.
 
Salem Brunk also earned a second team honor after placing sixth in the triple jump.
 
Marik Cummings, Quentin Hartel and Amaris Mora also claimed second team honors in the 4x100-meter relay alongside Casados.