School Name Goes Here

A group of 40 athletes will represent the Southern Oregon track and field team at the Cascade Conference Track and Field Championships starting tomorrow at Mt. Hood Community College.

Going into the meet, it looks like Concordia is the clear favorite on both the men’s and women’s sides. After that it’s up for grabs.

“Every year our goal is to score more points,” SOU head coach Brent Ericksen said. “We are taking more people this year so that’s a great start. For the guys we want to give Eastern Oregon a run for second and I feel like we’ve closed the gaps. For the women, we still don’t have a lot of numbers, but we can still get better and score more points."

The meet starts Thursday with the decathlon and heptathlon. Senior Rosie Converse is still looking to qualify for Nationals in the heptathlon and ranks fourth in the conference with 3,828 points.

“This is Rosie’s senior year and last chance,” Ericksen said. “She needs to find another 300 points somewhere and one good thing is that she’s really improved over the last couple weeks and it’s starting to come together.”

In decathlon, James Billstine will make his season debut and National Qualifier Alex Waroff will not compete in the decathlon - but will compete in six individual events for the Raiders.

Also on the men’s side, the Raiders hope to score a lot of points in the running events.

Kwame Agyemang ranks first in the conference in both the 100 and 200. Dennis Olstedt ranks second in the 110 hurdles and 400 hurdles and also ranks fifth in the 400.

Even though the SOU distance group is missing a few key runners, the Raiders still expect that group to carry the team on the men’s side.

Senior Levi Roudebush leads the conference in the 1,500 and ranks third in the 800. In the 10,000, Zach Elliott ranks second, Josh Seitz ranks third, Andrew Milne ranks fifth and Jerrod Puckett ranks eighth.

“Just scoring out the running events from the 100 to the 10,000, we could win it on the men’s side,” Ericksen said. “Unfortunately everyone else catches up when you add in the field events.”

On the women’s side, Chenin Young and Holly Haga are favorites to score multiple points.

Young ranks second in the triple jump, third in the 100 hurdles and seventh in the long jump. Haga ranks third in the discus and fifth in the shot put.