The championship portion of the season continued for the Oregon men this past weekend with the NCAA Regional in Provo, Utah. For the third straight season, the Oregon men claimed a top-five finish at the regional. The Ducks ended the two-day meet in fifth place with 63 points.
Oregon’s second-place finish in the conference finals two weeks ago helped the Ducks climb to second in the region and 12th in the nation heading into day one of the Regional on Friday.
Invites to the NCAA outdoors were awarded to the top-five finishers in each event at the Regional.
Oregon track athletes earned six of the team’s eight NCAA qualifying marks. Two such marks were made by coach Vin Lananna’s relay teams. The first-year skipper was especially pleased with his 4×100-meter relay team, which claimed its third NCAA automatic mark of the season.
“On the men’s side, the 4×100-meter relay did a great job, and all of our sprinters did what they needed,” Lananna said in a University press release.
Oregon’s 4×100 relay team, Jared Huske, Matt Scherer, Derrick Jones and Jordan Kent, took third with a time of 40.1 seconds.
USC avenged being narrowly beaten by the Ducks at the Pacific-10 Conference finals by winning the event with a time of 39.68 followed by Washington State at 39.93. Two weeks after earning the conference crown, the Trojans also won regionals.
Saturday ended with the 4×400 relay, which Washington won in 3:04.67. The Ducks’ Travis Anderson, Scherer, A.K. Ikwuakor and Kent added another third-place finish for Oregon in the event.
Scherer completed a regional trifecta by taking second in the 400-meter dash. It was the third NCAA qualifying mark met by the senior from Sumner, Ill., who entered the meet ranked No. 1 in the nation in the 400.
Like Scherer, Kent also qualified for three NCAA events over the weekend. The Eugene native will run the 200 at next week’s finals after finishing second in the event on Saturday.
In other track action, Oregon’s Eric Mitchum won his third-straight Regional crown in the 110-meter hurdles. Ikwuakor ran alongside Mitchum in the event and finished sixth.
On Friday, sophomore Galen Rupp battled for a top-three spot in the 5,000 with familiar foes Obed Mutanya and Robert Cheseret of Arizona. The race’s outcome was identical to that seen at the Pac-10s with Cheseret winning followed by Mutanya and Rupp in third. All three qualified for Nationals along with Giliat Ghebray of California and Hakon DeVries of Stanford.
Rupp’s teammate Michael McGrath appeared to qualify for the NCAAs in the 1,500, but was disqualified later for making excessive contact during the race.
In the field, Oregon’s Tommy Skipper was upset in the pole vault by Robison Pratt of host school BYU. Pratt won with a height of 18-4 3/4. Despite taking second, Skipper was glad just to make progress at the Regional.
“The conditions today were great,” Skipper said in a University press release. “We had a great tailwind, the temperature was great, and the field is really talented. I’m still getting my timing down on my nine-step approach, and I’m making progress.”
Freshman Matthew Maloney was the Ducks’ only thrower to qualify over the weekend. Maloney did so in the javelin thanks to his final throw of 222-5, which moved him up to third on the leaderboard.
Oregon athletes are guaranteed a spot in eight events at the NCAA finals, but the Ducks may be sending more. At-large bids to
athletes who scored the top remaining marks at the four regional meets will be announced later this week.
Ikwuakor and Colin Veldman are Oregon’s leading candidates for at-large bids. Ikwuakor’s sixth-place time of 14.06 in the 110 hurdles was three hundredths of a second slower than fifth-place finisher Justin Wickard (14.03).
Veldman has an outside shot at Nationals in the hammer. The redshirt junior from Ft. Collins, Colo., took ninth at the regional by throwing 195-04.