Ohio is headed to Oxford this weekend for the All-Ohio Championships.
Coming off of an outstanding performance at home last weekend, coach Clay Calkins is looking forward to seeing what Ohio is capable of this weekend at the All-Ohio Championships meet.
“We’re getting better and better each week, and that progression has been great to see,” Calkins said. “Across the board it was a well-rounded meet for us. We had a lot of standout performances. Moving on into this week, we’re going to try to pull off that momentum, and the All-Ohio Championships is a very important meet for us; it always has been.”
The Bobcats are still missing key sprinters freshman Courtney Guiley and sophomore Anna Michael, who Calkins had hoped would be back in the rotation for this upcoming meet.
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“That’s a bummer, but they are progressing back nicely,” he said. “They’re starting to be able to get some workouts in. They’re just a little off just being able to push a hundred percent. For sprinters, it’s a hundred percent or nothing.”
With that said, junior Kristin Winkel was able to hold up her end in the sprints by setting a career-best 14.11 in the 100-meter hurdles last week.
“We’ve lost a lot of seniors in the other events so it’s time for the juniors to step up and start taking the roles of scoring more points,” Winkel said.
As her senior year approaches, Winkel has been doing her best to prepare herself for that kind of leadership role, though there’s been pressure.
“You want the team to do really well overall, and you don’t want to make a wrong mistake,” she said. “You just want to try to pick up all the points you can.”
Fellow junior Tessa Weigand also had a notable performance in the 1,500-meter run last weekend with a career-best time of 4:40.04.
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“I didn’t really expect to run as fast as I did,” Weigand chuckled. “It felt really good running fast at home.”
In terms of setting a personal-best, Weigand said it had been a season goal of hers that she was proud to accomplish so early in the season.
“It’s really nice because now I can, like, I know I can run that fast and hopefully that can get me into the conference meet. That’s the ultimate goal: to be able to run at conference.”
Winkel and Weigand hope the team will do well in Oxford this weekend and plan to continue working toward times that will qualify them for the Mid-American Conference Championships.
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“There are going to be people from the MAC there so that’s always exciting to run against people that you’re going to face at the conference meet, and I think my confidence is up now, so that’s good,” Weigand said.
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