Northwest Nazarene University Open

 

The EOU Track and Field squads opened up the outdoor season on March 15th at the Northwest Nazarene Open, in Nampa, Idaho in mostly sunny but chilly weather. Other Colleges present were College of Idaho, Boise State and Treasure Valley Community College.

 

EOU Summary:
Eastern competed with a partial squad this week, as the Indoor National squad took the weekend off with the exception of Zach Heath (competing in his home town) and a fairly large number of athletes took the weekend off to focus on school heading into finals week.

 

Throws:
The women's hammer was the first event of the day for EOU and Coach Harrison's throwers started EOU off well, with Trisha Harshberger winning with a fine early season mark. Joining Trisha were a trio of freshmen (Rachael Jackson, Becky Unger and Cayla Burris) in their first ever Hammer competition. Rachel threw one of the best first time hammer competition throws we can remember here at EOU.

 

Cayla and Becky came back later in the meet to finish one two in the Discus as well- very fine day for this group of promising young throwers. On the men's side of things, the charge was lead by winter term transfer Quinten Baxter (Jr., Clackamas Community College). Quinten threw his way to a PR and an NAIA Auto qualifying mark in the Hammer and a 5th place spot on the EOU all time list- a very impressive debut in an EOU uniform for Quentin. All in all the throws group had a very promising day.

Sprints:
Despite the chilly weather, the EOU sprinters performed well with both the men's and women's 4 x 100 relays winning and a pair of second place finishes in the 100 meter sprint (Melisa Abesa for the women and Nate Schmidt for the men). The sprint group were a busy bunch as they used this meet primarily for a high performance workout session and most of them ran at least three different sprints, including a difficult 400/100 double as those two events are back to back.

 

Assistant coach Jack Kegg had much to be pleased with on Saturday. Nathan Schmidt had a particularly good day, as he ran with in a few hundredths of a second to his 100 meter Personal Record (PR) and shattered his 200 meter PR by about 4 tenths of a second. His 200 hundred time was almost double his 100 meter time- a hard feat to achieve.

 

Jumps:
LaGrande high product Nathan Humphreys was a busy young man for a short while as he cleared his first ever bar in a pole vault competition and then moved directly to the long jump. Nathan is in the process of becoming a promising young decathlete.

 

Distance:
EOU head Coach Ben Welch chose to focus on team running and placed all the distance runners who competed this weekend in the rarely run (outdoors) 3,000 meter race with a focus on working as a team. On the women's side, all three ladies (Katie Clapp, Christy Pletan and Rachel O' Reilly) ran life time PR's (Rachel may have just missed her PR), with Clapp and Pletan doing an excellent job of working together the entire race.

 

For the men, the goal was for all 9 guys in uniform to work together for the first 1,000 meters, then seek to work together in smaller groups (if they could not stay in one large pack any longer) for the next 1,000 meters and pound the last 1,000 meters to the best of their abilities. For the most part, they did a very commendable job of achieving that goal. As a result a fair number of them ran PR's, despite starting out slow and letting some folks from other teams go early- a tough thing to discipline ones self to do.

Summary and what is up next for EOU:
All in all the EOU staff is very excited about the outlook for the outdoor season.

 

Next up for EOU will be the EOU Mini Meet with Treasure Valley CC on Friday afternoon the 21st of March. Action will get under way at 4:30 p.m. Friday. One thing you will see (and may notice was missing from this week) will be the Javelin, Triple Jump and Shot Put- those events were held on Friday at NNU and we opted out of those events as we did not want anyone to miss any school this week.

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