Minnesota Duluth freshman Samantha Rivard couldn’t have picked a better time to set a school record.
Rivard captured the mile title at the NCAA Division II Indoor Track and Field Championship on Saturday afternoon in Winston-Salem, N.C., becoming only the second UMD woman to win an indoor crown.
Rivard’s time of 4 minutes, 50.3 seconds shaved 4.36 seconds off the previous UMD mark she set earlier this winter.
High jumper Jodi Swenson (1991) is the only other UMD indoor champion, while Lexi Williams’s 800-meter win in 2012 is the school’s lone outdoor crown to date.
Just a couple of hours after becoming part of UMD history, Rivard attained All-American status in another event by taking third in the 3,000-meter run. She finished in 9:44.98 while fellow UMD freshman Breanna Colbenson was 15th (10:00.59). In the mile, sophomore Hannah Olson’s seventh-place effort (4:55.59) was good enough to earn All-American honors.
UMD was 10th in the team standings, its highest placing ever.
- In the first day of competition on Friday, sophomore Kayla Wiltrout earned All-America honors after tying for eighth place in the pole vault. Her 12-foot-1 clearance earned her the distinction of becoming the first UMD All-American in the discipline.
Colbenson finished 13th in the 5,000-meter run with a time of 17:33.13. The Bulldogs closed the day with the quartet of Rivard, Olson and juniors Victoria Zoller and Amelia Maher finishing 10th in the distance medley relay in 12:03.41.
On the men’s side, senior Cole Toepfer wound up 14th in Friday’s mile preliminaries (4:18.94) to miss out on a berth in Saturday’s finals. He later joined the medley relay team that came up 2.61 seconds shy of achieving All-American status (top eight), settling for 10th. - St. Scholastica’s Becky Huberty and Nicole Christianson joined teammate Chelsea Johnson in earning NCAA Division III All-American honors at Saturday’s national meet in Lincoln, Neb. Huberty placed fifth with a program-record toss of 46 feet, 5.25 inches in the shot put and Christianson tied for eighth in the high jump with a leap of 5-5. Johnson, who won the 2013 Division III cross country national title, became the first indoor All-American in school history by placing seventh in Friday’s 5,000-meter final.
Wisconsin-Oshkosh won its 10th women’s team title.
