When a team loses a star player, most will—at the very least—lose a little momentum. That didn’t prove to be the case for the Washington University women’s track and field team. Even with junior and three-time University Athletic Association Most Outstanding Performer Daisy Ogede sitting out her final three events, the Bears still managed to lay an emphatic hammer down on the rest of the conference in the championship meet at Bushyhead Track this weekend. The Wash. U. women compiled nine event wins and 221 points, to finish a whopping 48 ahead of runner-up Emory University.
Meanwhile, the men’s team reclaimed its usual spot up top the conference leaderboard, netting four titles for 161.5 points, 24.5 ahead of Carnegie Mellon University. The win marked the men’s team’s seventh UAA championship in the last eight years after falling to second a season ago.
Skyler Kessler | Student LifeJunior Deko Ricketts of Wash. U. gains his lead in the men’s 800-meter run at the UAA Outdoor Championships on Sunday afternoon. Ricketts set a new UAA record with a time of 1:51.11.
Women
After trailing by single digits following Saturday’s schedule, the Bears grabbed a small lead when a team of freshman Elise Grever, senior Emily Warner, junior Kelli Hancock and Ogede opened Sunday with a win and a UAA-record time of 46.96 in the 400-meter relay. The Bears then began to pull away two events later with a trio of top-five performances in the 100m hurdles. Ogede captured first place and 10 points with a time of 14.79 while junior Rebecca Ridderhoff and freshman Jay Pittman finished at fourth and fifth, respectively, to earn the Bears another nine points to extend their lead.
It was in this race, however, that Ogede suffered what appeared to be an injury to her left quad. According to her, she felt a strain in her leg somewhere around hurdle six or seven of 10, but pushed to finish out the last 30-40 meters to earn the win.
“I did what I had to do to finish,” Ogede said. “I was happy to come in with the first place, despite the circumstances.”
“She’s one tough cookie,” head coach Jeff Stiles said.
While the exact nature of Ogede’s injury is unclear, she was walking on her own, albeit with some pain, just 30 to 45 minutes after the event. The lingering pain did, however, force her out of her final three events: the 100m dash, the 200m dash and the 1600m relay. While, the Bears did not exactly need her performances to capture the team title, her contributions would have made an already dominant victory near absolute.
In the preliminaries of the 100m dash, Ogede clocked a UAA-record time of 11.78 seconds, a tenth of a second faster than anyone in Division III this year and also beating out her closest conference opponent by nearly half a second. The same was the case at 200m. Ogede outran her closest opponent by nearly a second for the UAA record and improved on her existing time as Division III’s fastest 200m sprinter.
“Of course, there were feelings of disappointment that I wasn’t able to compete, but I know where I am—I know the type of athlete that I am,” Ogede said.
Even in those Ogede-less events, the Bears still managed to put together competitive performances. In the 100m dash, Grever nabbed second place with a time of 12.32, and in the 200m, it was Grever again, this time with a win at 25.49 seconds.
In the 1600m relay, sophomore Annalise Wagner subbed in for Ogede and joined a team of Ridderhoff, Warner and and Hancock to shatter the school record by a hair under six seconds.
“We broke the conference record in the [1600m] by six seconds—you don’t do that,” Stiles said.
In one of the more dramatic finishes of the meet, Wagner also won the 800m with a UAA-record time of 2:10.33. After leading nearly the entire race, Wagner was overtaken by a New York University runner in the final straightaway. With Wagner apparently destined for second place, the NYU runner collapsed about 15 meters from the finish line. Wagner continued on for the win, while the NYU runner recovered for a fourth place finish.
Senior Maisie Mahoney also won two field events for the Bears on Sunday. First, she won the javelin throw at 38.82 meters before securing a win in the triple jump an hour later with a career-best clearance of 11.36m.
Hancock also defended her conference title in the 400m hurdles, clocking in with a school-record time of 1:00.75.
On Saturday, the Red and Green captured its lone UAA title in the 3000m steeplechase when sophomore Alison Lindsay raced to a UAA-record 10:47.13.
While the Bears fared well in the conference meet without her, a long-term Ogede injury is a scary prospect, given the No. 2 ranked women’s team is looking to make a deep run in the outdoor national championships some four and change weeks from now. As one of the most versatile and consistently successful sprinters in Division III, a competitive meet without Ogede is a blow even to a team that prides itself on its depth. Fortunately for the Bears, Ogede was fairly confident she would be perfectly healthy heading into the national meet.
Men
Like the women, the Bears found themselves trailing by just a few points heading into Sunday’s events, thanks in part to a win in the 3200m relay on Saturday. In the race, a team of senior Josh Clark and juniors Deko Ricketts, Mike Sullivan and Conor Cashner won with a UAA record time 7:34.70.
The Bears continued to chase Carnegie Mellon University through Sunday, but finally pulled ahead in the 100m dash when sophomore Roderick Smith closed in from the back of the pack to earn a second place finish and eight points for Wash. U. With no Carnegie runners in the event, the Red and Green pulled ahead of the Tartans by seven and a half points. The Bears would pull away from there.
Ricketts earned a victory in the 800m with a time of 1:51.11, while senior Joey Pasque cleared 1.99m in the high jump to round out the wins for the men.
Looking ahead
With eyes on NCAA Outdoor Championships in late April, the Bear have four more tune-up meets before they hit the national stage. The first one comes this weekend, as both teams head to Jacksonville, Ill. for the True Blue Twilight meet hosted by Illinois College.