The preparation for last week’s Last Chance Qualifier in LaCrosse and this week’s NCAA National Championships in Greensboro, NC hasn’t left much time for writing.
To summarize our conference meet; we finished where I thought we would. I expected to be a little closer to St. Thomas in the team scores, but they had an outstanding meet. The combination of some Johnnies taking a final on Friday before competing and several getting their second vaccination shot that week didn’t help performances. We had some areas where we underperformed, but also had several strong performances.
In a big surprise, the sprinters were upset in the 4x100m relay. St. Mary’s continues to have strong relay- they were also at the National Championships in 2019. Both teams have qualified for Nationals this week and the matchup is setting up a good rivalry. However, our guys came back and performed well in the open 100m and 200m dashes later that day. Several season bests and PR’s. The guys were excited after finishing 2nd, 3rd, and 5th in the 200m.
The MIAC is always tough for distance runners and this year proved no different. Alexei Hensel (SO, Buffalo) and Nate Clausing (SO, Big Lake) had big PR’s to score points in the 800m run. Tommy Allen (FY, St. Paul Academy) and Mitch Grand (SO, Hutchinson) also ran well in the 1500m run. The gutsiest performance had to be Lloyd Young’s 10k. Several runners, including Lloyd, got sucked along to an extremely fast, early pace. Most of those runners suffered and went into survival mode to finish. Lloyd struggled as well, but at no point did he just phone it in. He gave it everything and still came back the next day to run a good 5k.
After the conference meet, we are always in a rush to get people home and move on to the Last Chance Meet. We had a big group of twenty-one athletes who wanted to extend their track season. The big news is that we were able to sneak two extra athletes into Nationals based on their last chance performances. Shawn Schindler (JR, Maple Grove) cleared 15-11.25ft for a big PR of 4 inches in pole vault. With Shawn, we knew he had a good chance and was on the cusp of qualifying. I did not predict or see Kevin Arthur (SO, Champlin Park) qualifying. He already had big PR’s at the conference meet by running 10.81 seconds in the 100m dash and 21.87s in the 200m dash. Both were big improvements over his high school bests of 11.36s and 22.53s. He had a great start in his prelim race in LaCrosse and ran strong for a time of 10.62!
Now on to the National Championships. We are currently in Greensboro, NC and getting ready to head to the track for practice. Of course, we need to go for Covid testing first. We have a big group of athletes with our 4x100 team (Jack Young, Kevin Arthur, Brady Labine, and Ryan Miller), both Ryan and Kevin in the 100m, Drew Dockendorf and Shawn Schindler in the pole vault, and Maguire Petersen in the high jump and javelin. The schedule of their events is below with the link for the livestream.
Thanks for following along this year!
Jeremy
National Championships Livestream
Eastern Times
Thursday:
3:15 4x100 prelims
3:30 Pole Vault
Friday:
2:30 High Jump
3:45 100 Prelims
4:45 Javelin
Saturday:
12:15 4x100 Finals
1:40 100 Finals