UW-Whitewater women’s track and field finished up their second meet of the season finishing third with a score of 91.5. It was a tough field of competitors including WIAC powerhouse UW-La Crosse who has won 29 WIAC championships. La Crosse finished first with a total of 195, dominating the meet. Second place was Elmhurst who finished with 107.5. Another WIAC rival UW-Stevens Point finished in fourth place with 61.
The Warhawks saw a strong performance from last season’s pole vaulting national champion Gracie Holland, who placed first overall for the pole vault. She took first with ease via a season best of 3.96m. The next closest was 3.81m from La Crosse’s Arace De Leo Lopez.
“I used the last meet as fuel. I wasn’t as consistent as I wanted to be. So coming in and making bars on the first attempt was my goal and attempts at 13 foot bars was really what I wanted to see,” Holland said.
The Warhawks also saw great performances from thrower Kenni Czarnecki who finished tied for second with a throw of 16.30m. Ari De La Cerda finished second in the 3,000 meters. Katie Erb placed third in the mile with Paige Fasbender not far behind her placing fourth. This was an important meet for the Warhawks to see just how they stack up against conference powerhouse La Crosse.
“La Crosse is one of the strong teams in the conference. We are trying to see how we stack up against those teams and La Crosse is one of them,” head coach Mike Johnson said. “We had a very good season last year. We are trying to build on that by seeing if we can close the gap on them. We got some good insight today and we’ll just keep building on that as we look to position people week to week as we prepare for the conference meet.”
Coach Johnson was also impressed with how well everyone performed for the Warhawks.
“It was a great day for our sprinters and our high jumpers. Just everyone across the board had a great day. That’s not always the common thing here. Half your events do okay, half your events do so so. But everything fell into place really well. We had a number of top 10 performances in our program’s history so it means we are not only competing but competing at a high level and we just hope to keep that trend going,” said Johnson.
The Warhawks look to build and keep up this production at their next meet when they will be traveling to Stevens Point for the Big Dawg Invite Feb. 3.
