If Jordan Kent is to be the savior of Oregon men’s track and field, he got off to a good start Saturday at the Oregon Twilight.
He started by saving the day.
After a mostly anemic performance from the Ducks at Hayward Field, Kent, a senior at Churchill High and Oregon’s top recruit for next year, won the 200-meter dash and the long jump in front of 3,346 fans. Hours after stepping off the track, Kent attended his senior prom.
“I just wanted to go out there and turn my nervousness into adrenaline,” Kent said. “I just really wanted to have fun tonight.”
Kent hasn’t lost a 200 this season, and that streak wasn’t broken by the best efforts of current Duck speedsters Samie Parker and Allan Amundson. Parker and Kent battled until the final 50 meters, when Kent legged out the split-second victory.
“I was watching it unfold in front of me,” said Amundson, who finished fifth. “Those guys are blazing.”
Kent ended the race with a wind-aided time of 21.20 seconds, which would have been a Pacific-10 Conference qualifier without the wind and without Kent’s non-collegiate status.
“It’s too bad it was wind-aided, but I’ll take a 21.2 any day,” Kent said.
In the long jump, Kent won with a wind-aided leap of 23 feet, 11 inches.
Parker was the only Oregon athlete to qualify for next weekend’s Pac-10 Championships at the Twilight. In the nine events not won by Kent, Duck athletes won four.
The biggest surprise of the meet was Jason Hartmann’s run in the 3,000. The sophomore, who already has an NCAA-qualifying time in the 10,000 and Pac-10 time in the 5,000, was running a competitive 3,000 for the first time this season and was a late entry into the meet. He finished second with a time of 8:20.02, but didn’t qualify for the postseason because the 3,000 is not a championship event.
In an emotional high jump, Oregon senior Kyley Johnson won, matched his personal best of 7-0 1/2 and had three good attempts at the NCAA provisional height of 7-1 3/4. But the focus of the introductions was on senior Jason Boness, the school record-holder who wasn’t competing because of an injury. The meet was Boness’ last in an Oregon uniform at Hayward Field.
The other Duck winners on Saturday were Trevor Woods in the pole vault, James March in the shot put and Sean Sanderson in the 110 hurdles.
Woods and hammer thrower Adam Kriz both notched impressive marks, but both fell short of their own previous NCAA qualifiers.
Former Duck Lance Deal, a four-time Olympian and the American record holder in the hammer, won the event Saturday with a throw of 240 feet.
The Ducks will now focus on the Pac-10 Championships, which start on Saturday in Pullman, Wash. Oregon has 28 athletes qualified for the event, and many of those athletes chose to sit out the Twilight instead of risking injury against the low-level competition.