CRETE, Neb. – This is being viewed as a pivotal meet for the Concordia University track and field squads, which have precious few opportunities remaining before the GPAC Outdoor Championships get started in two weeks. On the first of two days at the Jim Dutcher Memorial Classic hosted by Doane, the Bulldogs won a pair of event titles and got a fresh automatic national qualifying mark from senior Jazzy Eickhoff in the javelin.
Head coach Matt Beisel expected this to be a meet that would help push his athletes. The Dutcher Memorial features other top conference competition such as Doane, Hastings and Midland as well as NCAA Division II Wayne State College and NCAA Division III athletes from Central College and Nebraska Wesleyan.
Eickhoff narrowly missed out on hitting the ‘A’ standard in the javelin at previous meets, so it came as little surprise when she landed a toss of 134’ 1” in the javelin (third place) on Friday. That mark is just barely shy of her personal best (134’ 5”). She joins Liam Hennessy (hammer throw) and Johanna Ragland (hammer throw) as fellow throwers to pick up new ‘A’ marks this week. In the hammer throw in Crete, Ryan Sanchez also managed to eclipse the automatic mark once again (175’).
The men’s 4x800 meter relay of Nathan Matters, Christian Van Cleave, Thomas Taylor and Josiah McAllister made a run at an automatic time. The group finished in 7:45.73, good for first place and a ‘B’ standard that would rank No. 4 in the NAIA based on the national leaderboard entering the day. Concordia placed second on the women’s side of the 4x8 with a time of 9:46.70 produced by the quartet of Miranda Rathjen, Rebekah Hinrichs, Tori Beran and Alyssa Fye.
Another event title was delivered by Jordan Lorenz, who ran a time of 16:20.24 in the 5,000 meters. Teammates Wyatt Lehr (16:28.59) and Evan Asche (16:45.21) placed third and fourth, respectively. Bulldogs also made up most of the field in the women’s 5000. Erin Lindeman (21:19.72) placed second.
This marked the first meet of the season that allowed Concordia to showcase some of its multi-event competitors. School record holder in the indoor pentathlon, Jessica Deterding is currently sitting second in the heptathlon (2,692 points) with four events in the books. Five of her teammates are also taking part in the heptathlon. In the men’s decathlon, Rees Lyon is in fifth place (2,677 points) with half of the events left to be contested on Saturday.
The Dutcher Memorial will resume on Saturday with the first action starting up at 10 a.m. CT as the multi-events pick back up. Field events will get going at 11 a.m. and running events are scheduled to get underway at 1 p.m. The meet schedule can be viewed HERE.