Men’s, women’s track and field teams continue to improve
One word can be used to summarize the Utah State track and field experience at the Cherry and Silver Invitational Jan. 20-21 in Las Cruces, N.M., as well as head coach Gregg Gensel’s hopes for the upcoming season — improvement.
“The thing we look for is improvement and we had a lot of improvements today,” Gensel said. “Either from last week to this week, or from last year to this year, that’s what you want to see.”
The Aggies claimed 30 top-10 finishes and four event titles over the two days of competition. Sophomore Silas Pimentel won the 200-meter dash and fellow sophomore Bryce Hall won the weight throw.
Pimentel tied his indoor personal record (PR) of 21.48 seconds from his freshman season three years ago, before his LDS mission.
“I was actually really excited to be going that fast this early in the season,” Pimentel said. “I think that’s my indoor PR, and I tied it my first meet.”
Pimentel felt confident after racing the 60-meter dash in the preliminaries on Saturday morning, but said the wait time before the finals was too long.
“It’s usually only about 30 minutes so you don’t get too cooled down. Today it was a little over three hours. I don’t know why,” he said.
After the preliminary race, Pimentel was ranked fourth and came out of finals in ninth place.
“There’s plenty of room for improvement,” he said. “Coach is really helping me out with it.”
Hall, who also recently returned from a mission, said it was tough returning to competition after two years away from the sport.
“Coming back, you don’t really know what to expect as to how you’re going to do,” Hall said. “It’s just getting back into the mentality of competition and having fun with the sport.”
Going into the first meet of the season, Hall said his goal was to hit between 60-65 feet in the weight throw. After breaking the 60-foot mark last week, he said he’s now aiming for 65.
“Each week I’m improving to that goal,” he said.
On the women’s side, senior Katelyn Heiner took third place in the women’s 400-meter dash and 11th in the 200-meter dash.
“I felt really good about my races,” she said. “I didn’t PR, but I felt like it was a really good starting place. I’m hoping to do better than last year, and it feels really promising so far.”
Gensel said Heiner was one of the leaders of the team, because she always performs well and is “a good example and takes it seriously.”
Kylie Hirschi won the 800-meter in a time of 2 minutes, 12.93 seconds.
“I think I was hoping to do better,” she said. “I was hoping to get under 2:10. I mean, I’m happy with it, but I wanted to do better. “
Hirschi said she’s looking forward to the rest of the season.
“It’s the beginning of the season and so I have time to get faster,” she said.
Senior Spela Hus won the women’s shot put.
“All around it was a pretty good meet for most of us. There were a lot of PR’s,” Heiner said. “The thing about track is that you always want to improve — there are always times I’m looking forward to.”
The Aggies travel to Pullman, Wash., for the Washington State Invitational Jan. 27-28.
– ali.davis@aggiemail.usu.edu