OSU Squads Split Up for Big Weekend

Thursday, April 13

Walnut, Calif.

All Day

Oklahoma State University

Mt. SAC Relays

April 13, 2017 | Cowboy Cross Country & Track, Cowgirl Cross Country & Track

MEET NOTES

The Basics
Three small groups will represent OSU this weekend in California and Texas as the squads head to the Mt. SAC Relays and Bryan Clay Invitational in California, and the Horned Frog Invitational in Fort Worth, Texas.

Follow the Meet
Live results will be made available on each host school's respective website, and a full schedule of events can be found online. A tentative schedule is on pages three and four of the notes for the Horned Frog and Bryan Clay Invitationals, while the Mt. SAC Relays schedule is available on the meet's site.
Heat sheets for each meet will be available approximately 24 hours before the meet's scheduled start time.
Results and a full recap on the Cowboys and Cowgirls will be available on okstate.com following the conclusion of each day of competition.

Broadcast Information
Both the Bryan Clay Invitational and Mt. SAC Relays will be live streamed on FloTrack beginning April 13 at 8:30 p.m. and 5:45 p.m. CT, respectively.
The meets will be broadcast in their entirety on FloTrack, and will be available for viewing with a subscription.
The Horned Frog Invitational will not be televised or live streamed.

What to Watch For - April 13-15
The Mt. SAC Relays and the Bryan Clay Invitational are expected to feature some of the fastest athletes from around the NCAA, including several from OSU.
Josh Thompson is entered in both of the California-based meets in the 1,500-meter run.
Thompson comes into the race with the No. 2 time in the NCAA and will face stiff competition in NCAA indoor mile champion Josh Kerr of New Mexico, 17-time NCAA champion Edward Cheserek and a handful of other runners with some of the top-times in the NCAA this season.
Savannah Camacho is the highest-ranked collegiate woman entered in the 800-meter run at Bryan Clay, holding the No. 12 time in the NCAA.
Kaylee Dodd will join Camacho in the 800 at Bryan Clay and/or the Mt. SAC Relays.
Down in Fort Worth, Jacob Fincham-Dukes looks to improve his No. 16 mark in the NCAA against a field that is expected to include Texas Tech's Charles Brown (No. 1), Indoor long jump champion KeAndre Bates of Florida (No. 7) and host TCU's Scotty Newton (No. 14).
Ieva Zarankaite is the only other field athlete competing this weekend. She will throw at the Mt. SAC Relays after a big weekend in Arizona that saw the Cowgirl junior jump into the top-15 in the discus and the top-20 in the shot put in the West Region.

Last Time Out
Zarankaite won the shot put for the third time in three attempts this season, this time putting up a personal best mark of 15.37m/50-5.0. It's the No. 4 throw in school history and makes her the fourth Cowgirl to ever record a mark of 50 feet or better in the event.
In the discus, Zarankaite's win streak was snapped, but she took second with a throw of 54.04m/177-3.5, less than a foot from her personal best that is the No. 2 mark in Cowgirl history.
With her mark in the discus, Zarankaite qualifies for the European U23 Championships and the World University Games. Both competitions will take place this summer.
The throws put Zarankaite into the top-20 in the West Region in the shot put and into the top-10 in the discus, where she sits behind only two Big 12 athletes.
The senior javelin school record-holder, Honas, won her second javelin competition of the season and moved into a qualifying position for the NCAA West Regional with her throw of 46.32m/151-11.5.
Redshirt freshman Sukhi Khosla and senior Brigham Hedges went two-three in the men's 1,500-meter run and Kaytlyn Larson and Clara Nichols did the same in the women's 800.
Anthony Grogan Jr., ran a conference top-10 mark in the 200-meter dash, clocking a 21.45 in his open outdoor season debut. It was his only individual race of the day, but the Cowboy sophomore was busy on the track as a member of the 4X100-and 4X400-meter relay teams in Tucson, Arizona.

A Look Back: Week Four – 2016
Clara Nichols stole the show for the Pokes at last year's Bryan Clay Invitational, running a 2:04.64 on her way to a second-place finish and the top collegiate time of the day. She went on to run a personal best 2:04.45 at the Mt. SAC Relays the next day.
Kaela Edwards had big weekend in the Golden State when she ran an NCAA qualifying time in the 1,500-meter run and the NCAA-leading 800-meter time of 2:01.97.
Matthew Fayers and Tre'Tez Kinnaird also ran NCAA West Preliminary qualifying marks at the Bryan Clay Invitational and Mt. SAC Relays.
The Mt. SAC Relays and Bryan Clay Invitational in 2016 produced 11 of the 40 fastest men's 1,500-meter times in the West Region, as well as two of the top-10 women's 800-meter times and three of the fastest women's 1,500-meter times in the west.

Magnani Leads USA at World Championships
Oklahoma State freshman and Big 12 Cross Country Newcomer of the Year Michelle Magnani finished 37th in the under-20 women's race to lead Team USA at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships Sunday in Kampala, Uganda.
Magnani, a Cowgirl freshman from Moorpark, California, finished the six-kilometer race through the Kololo Independence Ground in 21:32 to help the American junior women claim 12th place in the Ugandan capital city.
OSU was represented in the U20 men's race as well by Cowboy freshman Alec Haines, who finished 58th.
Haines advanced to the World Championships as the seventh-fastest man at the U.S. Junior Championships in Bend, Oregon, but was the No. 4 American finisher in Kampala with his time of 26:28 in the 8K run.
The U.S. junior men took ninth overall.
Ethiopia won both the men's and women's junior team titles, while the Ethiopian men also took the senior team title and Kenya won the senior women's title.
Team USA finished fifth on both the men's and women's side of the senior races, and former Cowboy All-American Shadrack Kipchirchir finished 21st for the U.S. as the third-best finishing American man in the race.

Zarankaite Following in Ealey's Footsteps
Cowgirl junior Ieva Zarankaite had big shoes to fill coming into the 2017 indoor and outdoor seasons with the departure of Chase Ealey, the most decorated Cowgirl thrower in school history, last summer.
The Lithuanian international has stepped up to the challenge this year as she took her first All-Big 12 indoor honor with a fourth-place finish in the shot put, and is currently in the top-five of the Big 12 in both the shot put and her main event the discus throw.
Zarankaite recently became just the fourth Cowgirl in OSU history to record a mark of 50 feet or greater, and owns a qualifying mark in the discus throw for the NCAA West Preliminary Rounds. She is 11th in the region and 20th in the entire NCAA in that event.
This weekend, Zarankaite is throwing in the invitational section of the discus at the Mt. SAC Relays against some of the best competition in the states.

Thompson, Edwards, Men's DMR Take All-America Honors
Six members of the Oklahoma State track and field program took home first-team All-America honors at the 2017 NCAA Indoor Championships with seniors Josh Thompson and Kaela Edwards earning individual honors and Craig Nowak, Brandon Singleton, Bradley Johnson and Hassan Abdi earning the honor as a member of the distance medley relay team.
Thompson finished sixth in the men's mile, while Edwards finished fourth in the women's mile.
It was Thompson's first individual honor as a Cowboy as he finished fifth with the Cowboy DMR team a season ago.
For Edwards, the honor gave her five first-team and six overall heading into her final outdoor season. The Cowgirl senior is OSU's highest scoring woman ever at Indoor Championship events with 29 points.
Dave Smith's Cowboys advanced to the NCAA Indoor Championships in the distance medley relay for the fifth-straight season and earned first-team honors for the third time in that span behind a spirited effort from Abdi in the mile leg, who was only added to the quartet earlier in the week.
Overall, the Cowboys finished 30th and the Cowgirls took 39th.