Pride track and field ends semester with strong individual performances

DAVENPORT, Iowa - Getting their 2023 closed with their second meet of the season and their first meet for heptathlon and pentathlon athletes, the Clarke University track and field teams were able to set strong marks at the Finals Week Invite hosted by St. Ambrose University.

The Pride women found the top of the leaderboard for the second-straight weekend but fell just shy of another team win as the second place team at 119 points while the men finished right in the middle of the pack in fifth place after scoring 68 points.

In the multi-event competitions, sophomore Brody Deitering earned a first place finish in the men's heptathlon with 4575 total points as he either had the top mark or second-best mark in all seven events to currently post the second-best mark in the NAIA with the top-16 qualifying for the NAIA National Championship.

Jarrett Carpenter competed in his first collegiate heptathlon as he finished in third place with a final point total of 3150 with his best event finish coming in the pole vault where he cleared the bar at 3.10 meters.

On the women's side, Annemarie Korner finished as the runner-up with 3059 points as she had two event runner-up finishes in both the high jump and the long jump as she finished no worse than fifth in any of the five events within the nine-woman field..

Anyah Ranson, Isabelle Matthews, and Kaiya Gonzalez also all competed in the pentathlon as Ranson finished in fourth place, Matthews earned three team points in sixth, and Gonzalez earned two points in seventh.

Five other members of the Pride earned the highest team point scores in their events as Tyler Kell won the men's high jump with a 1.92-meter clearance in his second attempt before falling just shy of the NAIA A standard on his three attempts at 2.05 meters.

The rest of the four top scorers came from the women's side led by freshman Megan Hageman, who was the only athlete for CU to win two events, winning the mile and 800-meter with times of 5:36.27 and 2:33.20 respectively, Allena Rowland hit the NAIA A standard in the 400 meters with a 58.33 that converts to a 57.57 to break her own school record as she also broke the school record in the 200 with a 26.02 for third place, then Emma Grant and Grace Squires are the reason these weren't called "event wins" as they tied for the best mark in the pole vault of any athletes attached to a team as they both cleared 2.99 meters on their first attempt to tie for individual second but each earned nine points for the Pride.

Full results here: http://milesplit.live/meets/583551/events 

Clarke track and field now heads into the winter break as they'll get back to work in the first week of the spring 2024 semester when they head back to Davenport to compete in St. Ambrose's Battle in the Hive event on Saturday, Jan. 13.