The men and women’s indoor track and field teams hosted the Pittsburg State Invitational on Saturday, Jan. 26 on the Harvey Dean Track at the Robert W. Plaster Center.
Head coach Russ Jewett believes everyone felt “better” about the results of this competition as opposed to the previous competition they attended last weekend.
“Compared to our meet last weekend, we all felt a lot better about the outcome of this competition,” Jewett said. “All the teams did much better.”
On the women’s team, sophomore Haven Lander beat her own personal record in the women’s pole vault, junior Brianna Cooks won the women’s weight throw, and Jordan Puvogel beat her personal best time in the mile run. Senior Jena Black won second place in the women’s shot put and third place in the women’s weight throw.
On the men’s team, senior Kai Miller broke the Pitt State record and placed second in the men’s pole vault and junior Savion Cauveren picked up a PQ mark with his third-place win in the 60-meter hurdles.
Jewett hopes to see both the men and women’s teams make improvements throughout practice this week before the next competition.
“Well, the next event is not going to be as big of a competition as we had at home here and that is fine because in two weeks we will be right back at home again for another big competition, a two day competition called the Gorilla Classic so what we are looking for is really just to keep coming together as a team,” Jewett said. “We do not necessarily expect every week for performances to get better and better. It kind of sounds logical (like) we should get better every week, but it does not really happen that way… So, we will train hard this week… (and we are) really still building toward the championships at the end of the indoor season. We had some silly mistakes that athletes made, and we will work on eradicating those errors. But we competed really well this week and we will just fine tune some things for this coming weekend and then we will be ready, probably, for the great home competition in two weeks.”
The indoor track and field teams have a few upcoming competitions. On Thursday, Jan. 31 the teams will head to Warrensburg, Missouri to compete in the Mule Relays Combined Events. On Friday, Feb. 1, the women’s team will compete in the Women’s Mule Relays in Warrensburg, Missouri. Also, on Friday, Feb. 1 both teams will head to Lincoln, Nebraska to compete in the Frank Sevigne Husker Invitational. On Saturday, Feb. 2 the men’s team will compete in the Men’s Mule Relays in Warrensburg, Missouri.