This Sunday, the Bowling Green Falcons track and field team will compete at the Mid-American Conference Indoor championship.
This is a chance for the Falcons to improve on last year’s event, where they finished in 11th place.
The Falcons, however, have a lot of reasons to be confident going into this meet. The team managed to hit a total of 10 automatic qualifying marks, as opposed to one the year prior.
They also rank no. 14 on the top 20 list in the Great Lakes Region as of Feb. 18.
Players such as Brooke Pleger, Alicia Arnold, Brittany Sinclair, and Jeanette Pettigrew have managed to hit the qualifying marks. Arnold and Pettigrew, in particular, have qualified in multiple events such as the shot put and the 600 meter events.
The Falcons also managed to have another player move into the top 20 list in redshirt freshman Kori Reiser. She did this by setting a new personal best of 53-1 in the weight throw event from Kent State Tune-up this past Saturday.
BG track and field head coach Lou Snelling said he’s glad to see her improve and hopes to continue seeing her do well.
“She had thrown that mark back in December, so it’s good to see her move past that and improve,” he said. “Hopefully she’ll go into MAC and move forward from there.”
Pleger, who broke the school record this year and made it to the national championship round, won the weight throw event at the Kent State warm-ups. From Snelling’s view, he said her confidence is high going into the MAC Championship.
“Nationally being that high on the list and qualifying for nationals as well as the MAC levels, her confidence has to be super-high right now,” Snelling said.
As a whole, the head coach feels the Falcons are slowly but surely getting closer to being an overall balanced team. He says that although they still have work to do, they are still improving from last year and are in a good place.
“We’re closer to where we want to be, we have more ability, more depth…we’re not there yet,” Snelling said. “We’re getting closer to where we want to be.”
The first day of the MAC Indoor championship starts at 11 a.m. Friday, Feb. 28t in Kent, OH.
