The Triton men earn second overall, while the women place seventh among over twenty colleges.
This past Friday and Saturday, the UCSD track and field teams hosted the 21st annual Cal-Nevada Championship. The event pulled high-level athletes from more than 20 schools in various parts of the titular states, but the Tritons stood up to the challenge, with the men finishing second overall and the women earning seventh.
The two-day, twenty-event meet saw much success for both UCSD squads. The men and women’s teams sat in fourth and third place, respectively, after day one.
“We had a great first day,” UCSD men’s head coach Tony Salerno told the UCSD athletics department. “Both the men’s and women’s distance squads in particular really performed well.”
After the first day of competition, UCSD had six Tritons qualify for finals on day two, recording three NCAA provisional qualifying marks.
Sophomore distance Paige Hughes stole the show on Friday with a dominating victory in the 10K. Her time of 37 minutes, 4.39 seconds was 16 seconds ahead of SDSU sophomore distance Grace Hanshaw. Hughes’ big finish, as well as the strong performances from her teammates junior distance Madison Tanner (37:58.17) and sophomore distance Chandler Colquitt (37:58.20), gave the Tritons 19 points on the first day.
Senior All-American Lauren Irish earned a NCAA provisional mark while hitting a personal record with her time of 1:01.66 in her season debut in the women’s 400-meter hurdles.
On Saturday, after eclipsing the NCAA provisional mark in the preliminaries on Friday, freshman sprints Jared Senese finished second in the men’s 800-meter with a time of 1:51.62. He missed first place by half a second, earning the fifth-fastest time in program history.
Junior distance Carlos Bojorquez, a San Diego native, earned the first-place spot in the 1500-meter for the Tritons, finishing his section with a time of 3:55.18. Bojorquez finished a full second above UC Santa Barbara freshman Andrew Verdin.
In other men’s distance events, sophomore distance Scott Acton finished the 10K in third, running the nearly six miles in 31:09.07, six seconds behind the photo finish of Jackson Bright from UCSB and Jose Penaloza from Cal State Fullerton. Sophomore distance Tareq Alwafai finished the 5K in sixth with a time of 14:41.20, earning the Tritons four points.
Junior sprints Keith Rose finished second in the 100-meter dash. His time of 10.71 was a season best but not enough to beat Cal State Los Angeles’s Gregory Veals, who won the men’s 200-meter dash and earned the Men’s Outstanding Track Athlete of the Meet.
Junior sprints Sabrina Pimentel finished second in the 800-meter dash with a time of 2:12.75, just one second behind SDSU sophomore Dynasty Gammage. Fellow junior distance Anneke Kakebeen improved her time in the 3,000-meter steeplechase to 11:14.13, finishing eighth and giving the Tritons two points.
On the field, Triton athletes performed just as admirably as their teammates on the track. Junior throws Nash Howe, the defending California Collegiate Athletic Association champion, finished second in javelin with a toss of 214-48.”
Sophomore decathlon Dan Golubovic finished sixth in the high jump, jumping 1.95 meters, and senior pole vault Clint Rosser finished seventh in the pole vault. Sophomore jumps Randy Copeman jumped into the UCSD record books this weekend with his eighth place, 45-10” finish in the triple jump. Copeman is ninth all-time for UCSD.
On the women’s field side, junior heptathlon Veronica Bradley finished seventh in the high jump. Her jump of 1.58 meters tied with SDSU and Cal Poly jumpers Karsen Sper and Hannah McDaniel.
Overall, the UCSD men’s team lost only to Cal State Long Beach, which nearly doubled the Triton’s point total of 89. The men’s team beat several Division I schools including University of Southern California and UCSB and beat the defending champion Sacramento State by 10 points.
“The big focus is on the team competition for this one,” Salerno said. “Both teams competed very well. The second-place finish by the men’s team rates as a landmark moment in the history of the program.”
The women earned 49 points, 19 of which came from the 10K. San Diego State dominated the meet, winning for the fourth straight year. The nationally ranked Aztecs earned 178 points, beating Cal State Long Beach by 65 points.
“We had an amazing meet across all the event areas,” UCSD women’s head coach Darcy Ahner said. “This truly was a team effort by both the men and women and is yet another indicator of the quality of this young team.”
The Tritons now hope to build off of their momentum as a portion of the track and field squads will travel to Arizona to take part in another multiple-day competition in the Sun Angel Classic from April 11 to 12, while another segment will battle at Claremont in the Pomona-Pitzer Invitational on April 12.
