It’s not about the team anymore in the Western Regionals that begin today in Northridge, Calif.
After their strong team performances in the Pacific-10 Conference championships, the Oregon men’s and women’s track and field teams can now focus on individual efforts. The top five finishers in each event advance to the NCAA Championships in Des Moines, Iowa on June 11-14.
“Regionals is kind of the stepping stone to get into the big show,” senior thrower Colin Veldman said. “I want to get to nationals. That’s where I really want to throw far.”
Oregon head coach Vin Lananna is not particularly looking forward to the meet, not because he’s not expecting his athletes will do well, but he’s not a fan of the qualifying procedure for the championships. Many of Oregon’s athletes are already among the best in the nation; why should they have to compete again and risk not qualifying should they have a bad day?
“It’s an extra meet,” Lananna said of the regionals. “We want to focus on the NCAAs.”
While team rankings and performance aren’t much of a factor in regionals – there isn’t a winning team – the women, who finished third in the Pac-10, are the 11th-ranked team while the men are No. 14 after winning the conference championships, but rankings heading into it are based purely on projected finishes.
The women, incidentally, have more projected points than the men, whose depth helped them win the Pac-10. Lananna said as much: that the men are a “great conference team” while the women are a “national-caliber team.”
The women’s high ranking can be attributed to the likes of Rachel Yurkovich, who’s best javelin throw betters her regional competition by more than five meters, and Nicole Blood, who holds the best mark against her competition in the 5,000 meters.
“We have a lot of big point scorers and a lot of top-end athletes,” Lananna said. “I think they’ll make a little noise at the NCAAs.”
Other women’s projected top-eight finishers are the 4x400m relay team, Zoe Buckman in the 800m, Alex Kosinski in the 1500m, Kasey Harwood in the 400m hurdles, Melissa Gergel in the pole vault, Jamesha Youngblood in the triple jump and Keshia Baker in the 400m.
“This is exactly what I thought was going to happen,” Baker said of her second year at Oregon.
On the men’s side, Lananna said that the team is setting the foundation for next year’s nationally competitive team that he expects “will be really fun” to watch.
The men have 13 events in which they’re expected to finish among the top eight, most notably Andrew Wheating, who earlier in the year ran the fastest 1,500m time in the nation but will only compete in the 800m at regionals, where he is the No. 1 seed. Oregon’s A.J. Acosta, instead, will be running the 1,500m and has the best time in the field.
Both the men and the women already have two automatic qualifiers for the NCAAs as decathlete Ashton Eaton and heptathlete Briannne Theisen will be in Iowa, since the multi-event competitions don’t take place at the regional level. Theisen ranks third nationally with a season-best performance of 5,675 points while Eaton is ranked fifth with 7,792.
In all, the Ducks have 50 athletes who have met either the regional or national championship qualifying mark and only the multi-event athletes and the 10,000-meter runners won’t be competing this weekend.
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