Track athletes to compete at Pac-12 multis championship
Redshirt sophomore Kendall Gustafson is 26th in the nation in the heptathlon, but will try to add more points to her score at the Pac-12 championship this weekend. (Tehya Faulk/Daily Bruin)
By Michael Hull
May 6, 2016 12:19 a.m.
After a lengthy indoor and outdoor season, the moment the track and field team has been waiting for is on the doorstep.
The outdoor championship season, which begins with the Pac-12 championship, is one week away for runners and field event athletes, but three multi-event competitors will travel to Seattle one week ahead of schedule.
Sophomore Kendall Gustafson, sophomore Zack Bornstein and freshman Dominique Beltrez will suit up for their own conference championships.
Gustafson is currently 26th in the country for the heptathlon, a seven-event spread that consists of 100-meter, 400-meter, and 1500-meter runs, and the long jump, shot put, high jump, discus throw, pole vault and javelin throw.
Bornstein and Beltrez, on the other hand, have yet to register a decathlon or heptathlon score in the outdoor season, so this weekend will be the first and – depending on their performance – could also be the last competition of the year.
The conference championship is the last opportunity athletes have to qualify for the NCAA regional championship, where their performance could land them a seed in the national championship meet.
The two regional championships – one for the west, and one for the east – take 24 multi-event athletes with the best scores for their respective event spread, so Gustafson is in a good position to qualify for the western one as it is.
The 24th scores for the decathlon and heptathlon in the western region right now are 7,007 and 5,225, respectively. Bornstein and Beltrez will have to comfortably break those this weekend to qualify for the NCAA regional, and Bornstein’s best decathlon is just 16 points shy of the 24th place score.
Mountain Pacific Sports Federation and UCLA record holder Steele Wasik will not compete this weekend, as he is still recovering from an injury he sustained at the NCAA indoor championship in mid-March.
In his first decathlon ever last year, Wasik secured the eighth best score in UCLA history, and has the best indoor heptathlon score of any multi-event athlete that has come through the UCLA program.
Without a decathlon score for the outdoor season, Wasik will have to forgo the NCAA regional and national meet. At the indoor championship earlier this year, he was the No. 9 seed.
Back home in Los Angeles, select members of the distance team will go to the Occidental Invitational to run in their final regular season races, but everyone else will take the weekend off in preparation of their own conference championship.
The men’s team swept USC in every distance event last weekend while the women’s team only took nine out of the 27 distance points.
