The Utes had a solid overall performance last weekend at the Arizona State Invitational in Tempe, but the story of the meet for Utah was its showing in the 800-meter run.
Rosalie Waller and Ali Eisenbeiss finished with times of 2:05.60 and 2:05.97 respectively, which were good enough for second and third place in the race. Both times were individual personal bests.
“It was definitely a very exciting moment,” Waller said. “It’s nice when you train for so long and then you have your breakthrough moment, and my moment was last week.”
Utes head coach Kyle Kepler was also very pleased with the way Waller and Eisenbeiss ran.
“Ali and Rosalie train together every day, so to see them run such a great race and just barely get beat by an All-American [Arizona State’s Shelby Houlihan], that shows you the potential that they have and that raises their confidence level,” Kepler said.
Utah saw a similar result in the hammer throw with two top-five finishes. A 194-foot, 3-inch throw from Aoife Hickey was enough for a second place finish, and her freshman teammate Ilse Kaaja finished fourth. As for the 400-meter run, Rhianna Williams continued her impressive freshman campaign, clocking in with the third-best time in school history, which earned her a third-place finish for the meet.
“We gotta work on the technical events right now and some of the field events,” Kepler said concerning what his team needs to do to improve moving forward. “They need more live reps outside of practice. That’ll resolve itself with some time and more race competition. There’s a lot of steady kids. Maybe they’re not getting their name in the paper, so to speak, but they’re performing steadily, and so you know those big performance jumps are coming.”
Up next for the Utes is the Stanford Invitational this weekend. Long-distance runners didn’t compete at the Arizona State Invitational, whereas the Stanford Invitational is only for long-distance runners.
“Unfortunately [Utah’s group of long-distance runners] has kind of been a little bit mired by some virus stuff,” Kepler said. “We’re hoping to have everybody, and we’re at full strength. I know one of our better runners, Rebekah Winterton, is going through it. It’s still up in the air if she’s going to run or not this weekend.”
At the Trojan Invitational earlier this season, Winterton and teammate Susannah Hurst finished first and second respectively in the 5,000-meter run. Kepler is hoping to get Hurst an NCAA-qualifying mark in the 10K this weekend at Stanford. The Stanford Invitational is the last meet before the Utes host their own on April 11, the Utah Spring Classic.
[email protected]