The Wayne State College track and field team competed at the indoor NSIC conference meet on Feb 23 and 24, held at Mankato, Minnesota.
The Wildcats competed in the two-day meet with the men’s team taking 8th place and the women’s taking 13th. The men’s team had 31 points overall. Some of the medal winners were Dylan Kneifl taking 2nd place in the high jump, Debonaire Williams finishing 3rd in the heptathlon, and Keaton Waitter placing 5th in the 60-meter hurdles, breaking his school record, which is now 8.08 seconds.
On the women’s side, the team had 13 points. Olivia Schwarzrock was the top finisher placing 3rd in the weight throw and 7th in shot put. Some other placers were, the DMR, run by Callie Kirchner, Sarah Cotton, Kylie Pachta, and Allison Stineman. Haley Baker got eight in the weight throw, Kylie Patcha got 7th in the 800, and Anna Coffee got 8th in the pentathlon.
Quinten Dreyer, who raced the DMR and one-mile, is a junior on the team. He received an 8th-place medal on the DMR team.
“I feel like we all went into the meet ready to compete, but we just did not get some of the outcomes we were hoping for,” Dreyer said. “I think we trusted our training going into the weekend and we did peak, just not as extreme as we had hoped.”
Head Coach Marlon Brink said that it was a good meet but there was a lot of tough competition.
“We had a lot of people with lifetime or season best at this meet,” Brink said. “The competition is just as good as it has ever been and there were a lot of NSIC records broken over the weekend.”
The team had a lot of goals going into the meet and talked about it before the start.
“We told the team that every event and every point was going to be a challenge to score and that there were going to be no easy points anywhere in the meet,” Brink said. “No one can show up thinking that they are guaranteed a metal.”
The Wildcats will have about a month off before the outdoor seasons begin. The outdoor season offers athletes some new events that are not offered inside. The first meet will be in Wayne, The Wildcat Classic, on March 28 and 29. The cats will be going back to Mankato for the outdoor NSIC conference meet May 9-11.
