The track and field team will travel to Houston this weekend as they compete in yet another toughly stacked meet.
South Florida, Houston, Rice and Stephen F. Austin will be among the starting blocks along with the Wildcats. This will be no surprise for the ‘Cats considering they are coming off a strong team performance last week at Texas A&M against tough competition.
Junior Allie Hackett continued her journey as being one of the top distance runners in school history by claiming wins in the 5k and 3k. Along with fellow distance runner, Diana Garcia-Munoz are in Seattle, Washington, competing in the University of Washington Invitational.
Hackett will be competing in the 3k, 5k combo and Garcia will be running in the mile. The best runners in the country will be there and ACU took their top two runners to compete.
“It’s a packed field with a lot of great competition,” Hackett said, “So I just want to pick a girl and stick with it and hopefully get a great PR.”
Those who didn’t go to Seattle will be going to Houston, including those who didn’t compete last weekend in College Station. The teams have had two weeks off of competing, but not of practicing.
“The last two weeks have been solid,” assistant track coach Ray Walker said. “We had some good workouts and recovery days to prepare this weekend.”
Walker traveled with Hackett and Garcia to Seattle since he is their primary coach. Head coach Keith Barnier did not travel with the team last weekend due to health issues he had over Christmas break. Barnier had doctors appointments this week and will not be with his teams this weekend at Houston.
The Wildcats will be looking for more personal records and top-10 finishes like they had last weekend. Both the men and women’s 4×400 relay will look to improve off of their sixth place finishes last weekend as well as improve team finishes overall.
Conference teams will be at the Houston Invitational and with the Indoor conference championships less than a month away, this is one way the coaches will see how the Wildcats stack up in terms of conference standings.
“We’ll get to see where we are as a program,” Walker said.
Events start Friday at noon with the women and men’s Pentathlon events. Saturday will be all final events with results posted after the meet.
