INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – The 2019 NCAA Division III Track & Field Championships will be held this weekend, May 23-25, at the SPIRE Institute in Geneva, Ohio.
The SCAC will once again be well represented at the national meet as 15 student-athletes in total will be making the trip to Ohio to compete in 15 different events, led by Texas Lutheran who is sending nine individuals and one relay team.
Trinity will be represented by four student-athletes, while Colorado College will send two.
On the men’s side, the Bulldogs are led by a trio of upperclassmen in senior Garrett Garza and juniors Darren Jones and Paris Foster.
Garza, the first TLU male to qualify for the championships in a field event, will be making his second-straight appearance at outdoor nationals in the shot put. After finishing 15th in the country a season ago, Garza will look to improve on his showing this year having qualified with the third-best toss in the country at 17.39m.
Jones and Foster, who were members of TLU’s 4x100 national runner-up team in 2018, return to the national meet for the first time as individual qualifiers. Jones will be the 11th seed in both the 100 (10.56) and 200-meter (21.37) dashes, while Foster qualified 20th in both the 100-meters (10.63) and the 110-meter hurdles (14.62).
TLU sophomore Connor Thompson will amake his national championship debut after qualifying 12th in the 400-meters with a time of 48.04. Freshman Tyler Dykes will join Jones, Forster and Thompson as the quartet qualified in the 4x100 meter relay, seeded 14th after posting a time of 41.31.
Trinity will be represented in the men’s championship by a pair of runners, senior Blair Walker and freshman Sean Majors.
Walker will compete for the second-straight year, having been apart of the Tigers’ 4x100 relay team that finished 16th at the 2018 championships. This time, Walker makes his trip to nationals as an individual - earning the 11th seed in the 400-meters with a time of 47.95. Majors earned his season-best mark of 7.17 meters on the final day of qualification at the Gregory Invitational last week, sending him to nationals as the 20th seed in the men's long jump.
Finally, Colorado College will be represented on the men’s side by senior Henry Baldwin, who makes his second-straight appearance at nationals. Last year Baldwin finished in a tie for 20th in the high-jump and this year enters the competition at the 19th seed with a mark of 2.05m.
On the women’s side, Texas Lutheran sends four athletes, while Trinity sends two and Colorado College one.
For the Bulldogs, Ashley Rynard was the ninth qualifier in the 800-meter with a time of 2:11.57. A junior, Rynard will make her second-straight national championship appearance after a ninth-place finish in the same event last year. Cortnee Priour advances to the national meet for the third consecutive year. This year the senior qualified for the triple jump with a leap of 11.81m after earning All-American honors last year in the long jump. Senior Ashley Myers, a former qualifier in the 200-meters, qualified in 2019 for the 100-meters as the 21st-seed with a time of 12.18. Freshman Tia Hart will make her national debut in the javelin with a throw of 41.14m, good enough for the 20th-seed.
The TU Tigers will be represented by seniors Abigail Bannon-Schneebeck and Molly McCullough.
Bannon-Schneebeck earned her qualifying time of 1:02.33 in the 400-meter hurdles at the Trinity Open on March 2, which held up as the 17th seed for nationals. She is making the trip to nationals for the first time in her career.
McCullough is making her third consecutive trip to nationals in the 3,000-meter steeplechase. She finished 15th at the NCAA Championships in 2017, then just missed All-American honors with a ninth-place finish in 2018. McCullough enters this year's event seeded seventh with a time of 10:48.03 that was earned at the Mt. Sac Relays last month.
Finally, CC Tigers’ Camille Weaver qualified in the 22nd and final spot for the women's heptathlon on Thursday, May 16 at the Redlands Final Qualifier Meet in Redlands, Calif. She compiled a total of 4,488 points in her first-ever heptathlon.
The Bend, Ore., product is the first female from CC to compete in the heptathlon at the national meet since Heather O'Brien won the Division III title in 1998.
For each men’s individual event contested, including the decathlon, the top 20 declared student-athletes were accepted into the competition. For each women’s individual event contested, including the heptathlon, the top 22 declared student-athletes were accepted into the competition. For each relay event contested, the top 16 declared relay teams, one per institution, were accepted into the competition.
To view the entire list of qualifiers, click here.