Track & Field Championship Wrap Up

 

5.10.08

 

Ben Welch

 

GRESHAM, Ore. - The 2008 Cascade Conference Track and field championships are now history and the EOU squads came out with a 2nd place finish for the men and a 3rd place finish for the women in the team battles.

Men:

One could say the EOU Men's chances at a conference championship were literally hamstrung as the sprint core was hampered all week by several hamstring issues. Consider multi event standout Chris Hoppie was unable to compete on day three and was limited on day two by a hamstring issue that quite likely ended his season.

 

One has to give Chris props for toeing the line on Friday despitethe tender nature of his hamstring. Also hampered by hamstring problems was big "Husky" Nathan Schmidt who competed very well this weekend, despite a strained hamstring from two weeks ago. The Mountie cause took another hit when Adam Miller blasted out of the blocks in the 100 meters on Friday and stumbled, straining his hamstring and leaving him unable to compete in the 400 H and on the 4 x 400 relay on

 

Saturday....a tough pill to swallow for the tough Junior. Despite all the injury issues, the sprint/jumps group stepped up in a number of areas. After a strong showing in the 4 x 100, 400 100 and 110 High Hurldes on Friday, assistant coach Jack Kegg's men came back to place three guys in the top 7 of the 200 meter dash, including Schmidt and Kirk Miller who actually tied for 3rd and 4th, a mere .04 of a second behind 2nd. Given Schmidt's hamstring issues and the severely bruised foot Kirk Miller acquired in the jumps earlier in the meet, a very strong showing indeed.

Freshman high hurdle specialist Robert Manwell stepped up his racing in the absence of the injured Adam Miller to finish well above his seed with a 2 + second PR in the 400 hurdles. All in all this group should feel very good about how well they competed this weekend.

With most of the Distance action having been concluded over the first two days of the meet, there were two events left on Saturday, the 800 and the 5,000 meter runs. In the 800 meter run, third ranked Adam Goulet came from behind to win a thrilling race by just .04 of a second over the top ranked competitor (Tyler Hopper of C of I) who crashed right at the finish as Adam was passing him.

In the 5,000 meter run EOU was not expected to score according to the pre meet entries, but the distance squad had other ideas. There were two heats of the men's 5,000 and Cameron Starner, Troy Blackburn and Carlos Quintana all worked well together for a good portion of the race to take a stab at scoring out of the slow heat with Cameron finishing second in heat one and Troy finishing 3rd, with Cam's time being close to his PR he set last year, while he was fresh. Cam had a good showing this weekend as he also PR'd in the Steeplechase.

 

Quintana set a new lifetime PR as well. In the fast heat, Doug Benson came up big as he ran a gritty race to lower his PR by 24 seconds and finish 5th in a loaded field. Justin Dean doubled back from the 10K on Thursday to finish a very respectable 10th while fighting for a top 8 finish the majority of the race.

In Field event action Quinten Baxter came up big in the Discus with a huge seasons best throw (by more than 11 feet) and a life time PR to finish 5th, just ahead of Josh Ross in team scoring where Josh finished 6th. Jason Dunten almost squeaked into finals (he actually took one throw in finals due to an officials error).

 

In the Javelin Lane Bailey stepped up his game to record a seasons best and and NAIA Provisional mark to finish third. In the jumps, Lucas Ohmes overcame a slow start to finish 3rd. In the triple Jump, Peter Fry put together a pretty big jump in the late rounds to notch a third place finish and Kirk Miller ended up 6th after he was unable to complete his jumps in the final as he was fighting a bruised foot from the Long Jump.

The final event of the day was the men's 4 x 400 that saw a scratched together group of Gary Truman, Adam Goulet, Jeff Roy and Fernando Morales get their bid for the win literally knocked out of their hands when another runner cut in to quickly at the cut point on the second leg and knock the baton out of Goulet's hands. Unfortunately, there was no official at the cut point so no foul was called on the other team.

All in all the men competed well and we feel fortunate to have ended up 2nd with all the adversity they had to overcome.


Women:
The women's meet was less dramatic in regards to injuries, but was perhaps even more marred by controversy. On the plus side, Cayla Weissert ended her meet with a big break through in the 400 meter hurdles where she set a big PR to finish 6th- a very fine meet for Cayla.

 

Chelsee Harmon got after the 400 hurdles as well, but was hampered a bit by the fact that several hurdles were set at the wrong height in a couple of lanes- naturally one notch to high and in her lane! Despite that handicap, Chelsee managed to finish 4th. In the 4 x 400 a bit of meet mismanagement caught up with Chelsee again when the finish line officials did not clear folks off the track in the exchange zone and on the final exchange

 

Chelsee crashed into Concordia's third runner who had just competed their exchange. EOU was running a very close third to Concordia and Oregon Tech at the time. Despite the dropped baton that resulted from that mishap the women managed to put up their best time of the year and a 4th place finish.

In perhaps the biggest single event bungle in meet history, the women's 800 ended up being run twice after officials placed the runners, in both heats, on the wrong starting spot (the 400 meter start- or two turn stagger, rather than the 800, or one turn stagger line). This resulted in all the results being ruled void as not everyone ran the same distance do to the fact the line they started on is designed to even things out over a full 400 meters rather than one hundred meters. As a result, the women's 800 ended up being run shortly after the men's 4 x 400 concluded- that is by the 8 (out of more than 20) women who could make it to the line after many of them ran the women's 4 x 400 shortly before hand.

The net result of this mess is that Marcella Bosch not only defended her conference crown, but she did it in commanding style- twice in one afternoon! Perhaps the biggest pity is that pretty much any way we figure it (figuring several different ways mathematically using the distance she did and did not run and her time from first race and how she ran it the second time while much more fatigued) she would have been under the meet record and the NAIA Auto qualifying mark and perhaps the EOU school record.

 

All in all a rather remarkable performance- remarkable enough as a matter of fact, when coupled with her big win in the 1500 on Friday Marcella was named Conference Female Track Athlete of the Meet for the second year in a row.

 

In other running action, Melisa Abesa came back to race well in the 200, finishing 6th and on the ill fated 4 x 400 where she ran second and handed off in contention for the win. Along with Harmon, Abesa was joined by a strong opening leg in Grace Deboodt and on the third leg by a busy Kasie Gillespie. Stephanie Windle completed a busy weekend (including a strong run in the ill fated first running of the 800), by finishing 5th in the 5,000 meter run.

In field action Gillespie joined up with teammate Shauna Dahlin in the first women's event of the day on Friday where both of them finished above their seed position to finish 4th and 3rd respectively. In the discus, EOU placed 4 women in the final with three of them scoring. Freshman Kayla Burrus lead the way with a 6th place finish and was followed by Trisha Harshberger and Becky Unger in 7th and 8th to round out the scoring(Tiffany Ulmer was 9th just out of scoring).

 

In the Javelin Grace Deboodt finished 10th in a loaded field. Both Alexa Loscutoff and Courtney Scmidig had solid daysto place in the Triple Jump.

All in all, despite the ups and downs and including the miscues and strong performances, the EOU staff feels pretty good about the overall performance of the teams. The women ended up scoring 1.5
points more than the entries indicated they would and the men scored 18 less than projected. We look forward to next years addition of the meet!

Next up will be the NAIA National Championships in the Saint Louis Missouri area on May 22nd, 23rd and 24th.

 

 

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