The future is looking bright for Marquette track and field’s women’s side, as the team placed 13th, its best finish at the Big East Indoor Conference Championship since 2008. The men’s side placed 11th, with 22 points in the effort. Coach Bert Rogers was pleased with the team’s overall performance coming out of the weekend.
“It’s an indicator that we’re improving and getting stronger,” Rogers said. “We’re trying to improve our weak areas. We definitely picked up some points from freshmen, so I think that’s a sign of things to come in the future.”
Early freshmen contributors included Tate Pashibin in the high jump, who placed fifth at the meet and moved into fifth place on the Marquette record list. Molly Hanson was just more than a second off a personal best but still managed to put together an eighth place finish in the women’s mile. Only two Georgetown runners had a better finish in the race as freshmen.
Hanson also contributed in the women’s 4×800-meter relay with classmates Nicole Ethier and Kayla Spencer and sophomore Katie Tolan. A collective time of 9:05.60 placed them fourth all-time in school history.
Not to be outdone, juniors Kate Hein, Katie Kemmerer and Gretchen Homan and freshman Laura Schweikert recorded the fourth-best time in Marquette history for the women’s 4×400-meter relay.
Hein surprised herself and the rest of the Golden Eagles by notching a two-second personal best and setting the school record in the women’s 500-meter dash with a time of 1:13.48. At the Meyo Invitational, she finished seventh overall with a time of 1:15.86.
“It was really exciting that all my training was able to come together and I was able to improve by that much,” Hein said. “I was hoping to sneak into the finals as maybe the seventh or eighth person, so getting sixth (in the finals) was great.”
Last year’s indoor season’s most valuable athlete, junior jumper Carlye Schuh, headed into the weekend with a chance of placing in the top three for the long jump. After four fouled marks, she finished fifth overall with a jump of 5.72 meters.
“I definitely wanted to finish higher,” Schuh said. “The jumps didn’t really go as I wanted them to, and I wanted to put a farther mark out there. I’m a lot stronger and a lot faster, which is better for the getting down the runway.”
The depth of the conference in the men’s 800-meter dash was on display, as senior Kyle Winter could not defend his title from 2012. However, Marquette still had Winter and freshman Anton Rice in the final round of competition.
Rice ran a personal best of 1:53.23 while executing a tactical race plan to sneak into the finals. Winter headed into the finals with the fourth-best time from the preliminaries.
He was joined in the finals by three new faces, as freshmen from Connecticut, Georgetown and Notre Dame found themselves in the final. Villanova junior Christopher Fitzsimons came in with the victory after finishing fifth last year. Winter (1:52.43) edged out Rice (1:53.43) by a full second, as the two finished sixth and seventh, respectively.
The men’s 4×800-meter relay team of redshirt sophomore Mitch Lacy, sophomore Brendan Franz and freshmen D.T. McDonald and William Hennessy finished seventh overall with a time of 7:38.37, which puts them fifth on the Marquette all-time list.
Marquette will use the next few weeks to rest up some of its more active runners. There are still “last chance” meets on the schedule for those with a chance of qualifying for the NCAA Indoor Championships, but Rogers and his staff are still undecided about who will be participating in those. A majority of the team will soon start preparing for the outdoor season.
