The Marquette track team kicks off its season on Friday with its opening meet at the Notre Dame Blue & Gold Invitational. The meet, which has been referred to as a glorified practice by runners and coaches, will aso feature Notre Dame, DePaul and Detroit-Mercy.
“It will be a pretty low key meet for us,” coach Bert Rogers said. “It’ll be a nice opening for us.”
The Golden Eagles will be bringing mostly sprinters and jumpers to this meet, with the throwers staying home. Among the 28 athletes competeing will be sophomore high jumper Cheldon Brown, junior sprinter Stephanie Grant and freshman sprinter Connor Stengel.
Rogers believes this meet will serve better as a preparation meet for more competitive meets later in January and February, and that this will be a good meet to start with after fall practices.
“Obviously we want to run well and jump well at this meet, but we are more looking at training up for the meets in January and February and that part of the season,” he said. “This is just kind of a nice test to see where we are at before finals in two weeks.”
Marquette hopes to improve on last year’s successful season in which it sent eight athletes to the NCAA west regional, including women’s cross country star Olivia Johnson, who seems primed to have a big year on the track for Marquette.
“Johnson did well in cross country, but she is even better in the mile on the track,” Rogers said. “We’re looking for some big things out of her.”
She isn’t the only one on Marquette who is looking to compete at a high level this year. According to Rogers, this team is deeper in most event areas and thus should do better. But with such a wealth of freshman and sophomores, 55 total on the roster, anything can happen. Everyone around the team is optimistic, though, about the impact that the young athletes can make.
“The freshman definitely bring a very good energy to the team,” Brown said. “They have a lot of drive and bring a lot of energy to every practice.”
“We have a lot of middle distance freshman,” Grant said. “They bring a lot of excitement and energy to the team. We are excited to see how they do.”
Two freshman Rogers singled out were Stengel and Aryan Avant, saying they both look very strong in the 200 and the 400.
“Our women’s throwers group is almost an entirely new group, save for just a few.” Rogers said. “We had a big group graduate last year, so we have a big group of freshman. We have some good hurdlers, and we should have a pretty fast 4-by-400 as well.”
