SE Kansas News

Track & Field Shines at National Championships

The Neosho County Track & Field teams took to Topeka, Kansas to compete in the NJCAA Indoor National Track & Field Championships. The weekend turned out to be one of the best in school history with the program breaking multiple school records and recording a number of personal best. It caped off one of the best indoor track & field seasons in the last 10 years for Neosho County.

On the women's side the Distance Medley Relay ran 13:16.25 and broke the school record by 5 seconds to finish 9th overall just one spot from All-American status. The same group of ladies followed up their DMR performance in the 4x800 finishing 5th and getting All-American status after a series of unfortunate events lead to a majority of the teams running a lap short and being disqualified moving the ladies from 11th to 5th overall. Naomi Salil ran her 3rd best time ever in the mile to finish 16th.

On the men's side the 4x800 ran 7:52.94 and broke the prior school record by an outstanding 7 seconds to finish 10th overall just two spots from All-American status. Gunnar Laurance ran 1:56.52, a personal best in the 800m to finish 14th overall. Pedro Mulero also had a personal best in the Heptathlon finishing 15th overall. Hunter Hill and Jared Sylvester competed hard in the 600m finishing 21st and 22nd respectively. The men's distance medley relay came away with 15th place,  and finishing off the meet was the Men's 4x400m relay team who ran a season best time of 3:22.27 to finish 19th.

Head Track & Field and Cross Country Coach Trey Bruton had this to say of the championship meet, "It was a great weekend for our program and the future of our program as we set the bar for success to build on, we are trying to set that bar pretty high. We have a great group of athletes that have worked incredibly hard and are seeing that hard work pay off. We had some athletes really break through some barriers, build some confidence, and really take their performances to the next level. While we were hoping for a few more All-Americans on the weekend it was encouraging to see just how close we were to some of the best programs in the country in some of those events. Many of those teams have a lot more resources than we do at Neosho but we have closed the gap tremendously through hard work and sheer determination. I am excited to see the foundation we continue to lay and build upon. Indoor season was one of the best ever but now we move to outdoor season and I am really looking forward to it, we have the potential to have one of the best years ever there also."

Original source can be found here.