RCW: Inside Track & Field 3.36
Get a quick look inside your favorite Kansas Jayhawk programs each week with Rock Chalk Weekly’s Inside Sports pages. Notable statistics, quick hits and the top social media posts get every Jayhawk fan up-to-speed and ready for another week of thrilling competition.
Number BY THE NUMBERS
The Kansas men’s and women’s track teams will feature 17 entries at this week’s NCAA Outdoor Championships to be hosted at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. That includes a trio of relay teams: the men’s 4×400-meter, women’s 4×100-meter and the women’s 4×400-meter quartets.
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Notes QUICK HITS
- This week, the Jayhawks will travel to Oregon’s Hayward Field, a venue Kansas will be competing in for the eighth-straight year and is slated to host each of the next four NCAA Outdoor Championship meets.
- This week, the Kansas men checked in at No. 6 in the latest NCAA rankings. That marks the highest the Jayhawks have been ranked in the program’s history dating back to 2008 when the current ranking format began.
- The Jayhawk men will look to claim their 21st top-10 team finish at the NCAA Outdoor Championships and their first since 2010. A top-five finish would be the program’s 12th and its first since 1975. Kansas won three team titles: in 1959, 1960 and 1970.
- A top-eight finish by senior Mitch Cooper or junior Nicolai Ceban in the discus this week would mark the fourth time in eight years a KU male has garnered First Team All-America honors in the event.
- A victory for Cooper or Ceban in the discus would mark the third NCAA title won by a Jayhawk in the discus. Four-time Olympic gold medalist Al Oerter claimed back-to-back NCAA titles in the event in 1957 and 1958.
- Freshman Gleb Dudarev enters the week as the NCAA’s top-seeded hammer thrower. A victory in the event would make him just the sixth freshman over the last 40 years to win a national championship in the event and the first freshman in program history to claim an NCAA title in any event.
- Kansas will feature a 4×400-meter relay team at the NCAA Outdoor Championships on either or both the men’s and women’s sides for the sixth time in the last seven years.
- Senior Sydney Conley enters the week as the top seed in the long jump. A top-eight finish would mark the third time in her career to claim First Team All-America status in the outdoor event and would make her just the fifth Kansas female to achieve that feat in a single event.
- Junior Sharon Lokedi ran to a sixth-place finish in the 10,000 meters at the NCAA Championships a year ago. A top-eight finish in the event at this week’s meet would make her the 15th Kansas female to claim First Team All-America status multiple times in a single event.
