Last year, Katie Bartels and Virgil Mitchell came home from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) National Indoor Track and Field Championships with gold medals.
This year, they came home with bronze.
But neither is disappointed.
Senior Bartels, who won the women’s high jump in 2009 with a mark of 5-6.50, said that she was happy with her performance.
“I was okay with placing third, especially jumping 5-8.75,” she said. “Last year I got first, but this year was so much more competitive.”
The competitive field also affected junior Mitchell, who was not able to defend his title in the men’s 60-meter hurdles. He ran a time of 8.03 seconds, increasing his time of 7.93 seconds from 2009.
“I’m not really disappointed with how I did,” he said. “I mean, I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on in my life right now, so I wasn’t as focused as I should’ve been. I pretty much just focused on the 4x4 and let the other two (the 60-meter hurdles and the 200-meter dash) just happen. Third (place) wasn’t really surprising.”
But his laid-back attitude didn’t have any effect on his performance in the 200-meter dash.
“In the 200 (-meter dash) a teammate picked up my spikes,” he said. “So I didn’t run in them. That factored in, so I was really okay with how I placed under those circumstances.”
Mitchell said that his teammates were the reason that he was happy with the meet overall.
“As a team, there were a lot of good things that happened,” he said. “Especially in the 4x4 (relay). We ran it better than we ever had and we all had to step up to do that.”
In the team standings, the Tiger women came away with 17th place, and the Tiger men with seventh place.
Senior DeeJay Silcott said that the women met their goal for this meet.
“We’re all just really happy with getting 17th,” she said. “We were looking at the board (during the meet) and seeing we were in 28th, and so we were excited when we moved up into the top 20. We’ve been top 20 for the past few years, so that was really our goal.”
Bartels said that the team put forth a united effort.
“Everybody came down and did well in terms of what they were expected to do,” she said. “We had a lot of medals and did very well overall, and a lot of people PR’ed (personal record). There were some good marks out there.”
And good marks helped Silcott to earn one of a handful of All-American honors awarded to Doane athletes.
“It (the meet) just went really well, especially in my own races,” she said. “I was an All-American and placed fifth in the 200 (-meter dash) and sixth in the 60 (-meter dash). I’m very proud of myself.”
Bartels didn’t get All-American honors, but she said that she was happy for those teammates that did.
“We had three All-Americans on the girls’ side, and I want to say five or six on the guys’ side,” she said. “It was really a great meet.”
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