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Marion, IN — The Goshen College men’s track team chose a good time to have one of its best — and most balanced — meets of the season, as the program took home an impressive fifth-place finish at this weekend’s Mid-Central Conference Championships on the campus of Indiana Wesleyan University.
With just one second-place finish and no other individual garnering better than a fourth-place result, the Leafs’ collective finish came via a true team effort, as Goshen’s 61 total points outdid the University of St. Francis (50), Marian College (45), Spring Arbor University (3) and Grace College (0). The end result was especially pleasing to head coach Rick Clark, who had to do a fair amount of convincing to his athletes that they were, in fact, right in the thick of the MCC chase as the event wore on.
“A lot of our guys kept talking about how low we were going to finish (in the team standings), but I kept saying, ‘No, just wait. We’re doing better than you might think,’” Clark said. “With many of our athletes finishing in the middle of a lot of events, we picked up points in a lot of different places, and we did it rather silently. When the entire weekend was through, our guys seemed much more positive about the future of the team. We can and will get even better collectively, and that’s pretty exciting given our finish this year.”
Freshman Tyler Keller led the team individually, finishing runner-up in the 400 meter hurdles event in a time of :57.16, a career best for the first-year athlete. Keller also finished seventh in the high jump (5 feet, 11 inches), but the hurdles lent Clark’s team its best singular finish of the weekend.
“Tyler has been really concentrating on (the 400 meter hurdles), and he had a near-perfect run in that event this weekend,” Clark said. “Even though we didn’t have any other finishes that high, this still was the best team performance of the season. We had quite a few athletes get points for us simply because they utilized the coaching and training techniques we’ve been instructing.”
Clarks’ squad received multiple fourth-place finishes on the day, including a fourth-place tie in the pole vault from two Leafs’ athletes. Junior Louis Robledo and sophomore Jon Casselberry-Scott each cleared 13 feet in the pole vault, taking an official fourth and fifth place finish, respectively. Brothers Jeff Hochstetler (146 feet, 6 inches) and Justin Hochstetler (138 feet, 11 inches) finished fourth and fifth in the hammer throw, while Justin notched another fourth-place effort in the discus with a distance of 132 feet, 10 inches, and took home the final scoring slot — eighth place — in the shot put with a heave of 42 feet, 5 inches. Sophomore David Rumsey grabbed a key fourth-place result in the javelin, tossing the object a distance of 148 feet, 2 inches.
“Our vaulters were very good today and our throwing corps placed in all four events,” Clark said.
Junior Jake Gillette helped pace the Leafs’ action on the track, scoring in both the 5,000-meter run (seventh place, 16:08.41) and the 10,000-meter event (fifth place, 33:04.80). Sophomore Sam Boldman finished sixth in the 110-meter hurdles (:16.73), while Goshen’s 4 X 400 relay crew of Keller, junior Randy Keener, sophomore Brent Handfield and freshman John Tamirat took fifth-place honors in a time of 3:33.17. The Leafs’ 4 X 800 relay squad, meanwhile, finished sixth in 8:18.59, a team comprised of Tamirat, Rumsey, Keener and freshman Ben Bouwman.
Handfield paced Goshen in the horizontal jumping department, registering a fifth-place finish in the long jump (20 feet, 5 inches) and a seventh-place finish in the triple jump (40 feet, 7 inches). Handfield came just a millimeter scratch away from hitting the 21-foot mark in the long jump, a distance that would have propelled him to fourth in the event.
“Jake Gillette led the distance crew with two good runs and Brent came really close to having a tremendous result in the long jump,” Clark said. “Overall, this was a very successful conference meet for us.”
Indiana Wesleyan University captured the men’s team championship, registering 208 points on the weekend. For a complete list of team and individual results and finishes from the MCC Championships, click here.
Goshen will return to the track and field on Friday, when the team travels to NCAA Division I University of Toledo for the Toledo Rocket Open. That’s followed by a trip to Indianapolis on Saturday for another D I event — the Butler University Twilight Meet.
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Junior Louis Robledo