School records have been broken and personal marks have been bested.
They are results from two invitationals in a season the Fresno State women’s indoor track and field team hopes will result in a podium finish in this year’s Mountain West indoor championships.
So far for the Bulldogs: two first-place finishes from junior long jumper Je’Nia Sears, two third- and one second-place finishes from thrower Megan McKee; a second-place 60-meter dash mark from sprinter Shakira Lewis; and top-six placings from a set of twins going back and forth at each other.
Improvement, yes. A surprise?
“No,” Bulldogs head coach Scott Winsor said. “They started ahead of where they were last year at a higher baseline … and I think they’ll do nothing but get better.”
Fresno State, three seasons after leaving the Western Athletic Conference for the more competitive Mountain West, expects to be one of the top three teams in this year’s conference indoor championships. It’s a contrast from last year’s eighth-place finish in a league Winsor described as “much deeper.”
Sears, the Mountain West’s reigning long jump champion, had the top collegiate finish in both the season-opening Air Force Academy Indoor Invitational and the University of Washington’s Indoor Invitational last week for that event. She finished with marks of 19-11 and 19-8.75, respectively.
Lewis ran personal-record time of 7.56 seconds in the 60-meter final at the UW invitational after finishing eighth at Air Force.
Sophomore sisters Kyra and Dezirae Johnson have traded photo finishes in the 400-meter. At Air Force — against other conference foes Colorado State, UNLV and Wyoming — Kyra finished fourth and Dezirae finished fifth in the finals.
In Seattle, Dezirae took second; Kyra took third.
These strides, Winsor said, are indicative of a better showing in this year’s conference championships, nine days before the March 8 outdoor season-opener for the men’s and women’s teams.
“You have to balance reality and dreams, but if the stars align, we can be in the top three.”
Several athletes have performed events in various disciplines this season. Sears, Fresno State’s No. 1 indoor and outdoor long jumper in school history, runs in the Bulldogs’ 4×400-meter relay squad to help bolster her performance in the long jump.
“Coming in, she wasn’t a quarter-miler,” Winsor said of Sears, who is aiming for back-to-back NCAA Indoor Championship appearances. “Never wanted to try to run the 400.
“She might not admit it, but I think she’s kind of fallen in love with running the 4×400. It’s a tough event for her. She doesn’t have a big aerobic capacity.
“It is helping her long jump. She can go out to practice and run approach after approach and not get tired and get something accomplished in the long jump that if she wasn’t running the 400, she’d probably break down sooner in the long jump run.”
Senior distance runner Carina Mendoza, Fresno State’s leading women’s distance runner who redshirted last season, set the school record in the 3,000-meter run at the UW invitational with a time of 9:40.42, a record Winsor said hadn’t been broken in a “long time.”
Sophomore Annemarie Schwantz also was close to breaking the record — she ran the 3000-meter in 9:42.44.
Warmerdam Field gets ‘desperately needed’ upgrades
The track and field team’s practice field received upgrades to its pole vault and high jump stations, renovations “desperately needed” for safety concerns, Winsor said.
The Fresno State Track Commission, the program’s fundraising arm, raised money to contribute to new pole vault and high jump pits, standards and weather covers.
Track and field mats “bottom out” in time, causing vaulters and jumpers to fall down further, increasing the risk of injury.
“Just a tremendous shot in the arm in those two areas,” Winsor said.
