By Steve Holt, Sports Writer
The final list of qualifiers for the NCAA Division II Indoor National Championships was released Monday, and ACU has fewer athletes on it than in past seasons.
The national meet, which will be in Boston on Friday and Saturday, will feature a combined 15 men and women in individual events and all four relay teams. ACU will send nine individual women to the national championships to compete in nine events, as well as the distance medley and 4×400-meter relay teams. Six Wildcat men qualified in eight events, along with both relay teams.
Head coach Don Hood said he was not too surprised by the list of qualifiers, but knows the Wildcats will have to step up in certain events to pull off a double win.
“We’re just not as spread over the same events,” Hood said. “We’re deeper in certain areas. We don’t have the field event depth than I wanted, so we’re going to recruit to fix that.”
Several athletes will compete in multiple non-relay events. Sophomore Shawna-Kaye Thompson and freshman Kim Prather will both run the 60-meter hurdles and the 200-meter dash, while Trina Cox and Olha Kryv’yak will double up in the mile and 5,000-meter run. On the men’s side, sophomore sensation Nicodemus Naimadu will run in both the mile and the 5,000-meter run, an event in which he set an indoor school record of 13:42.29 earlier this season. The only other multiple-event athlete on the men’s side is senior Yevgen Pashchenko, competing in both the triple jump and the long jump.
The other qualifiers for the women include: sophomore Keva Wilkins in the 400-meter dash; freshman Azraa Rounds in the 400-meter dash; senior Brooklyn Hunt in the 400-meter dash; freshman Jessica Withrow in the high jump; and junior Angie Aguilar in the pole vault.
Additional men’s qualifiers include: junior Marvin Bien-Aime in the 200-meter dash; senior Delt Cockrell in the 400-meter dash; senior Montez Pride in the 400-meter dash; and junior Vladyslav Gorbenko in the triple jump.
A notable men’s athlete who was left off the qualifying list was senior Cory Aguilar, whose provisional mark in the pole vault was not high enough.
“Those would have been some good team points,” Hood said, “but I was more disappointed for Cory.”
Members of the women’s 4×400-meter relay team include Brooklyn Hunt, Jessica Hunt, Rounds, and Prather. The women’s distance medley relay team includes Kryv’yak, Brooklyn Hunt, Vanessa Whittle, and Cox. The men’s 4×400-meter relay team includes Elton Garus-Oab, Pride, Jordan Johnson, and Cockrell. The distance medley relay team is comprised of Pride, Naimadu, David Chirchir, and Philip Birgen.
A complete preview of the 2006 NCAA Division II Indoor National Championships will appear in Friday’s Optimist.
