A-Sun Men's and Women's Indoor Championships

The
ETSU men’s and women’s track and field teams will host the 2012 Atlantic Sun
Indoor Championships this Friday and Saturday at the ETSU/MSHA Athletic Center.

The
women’s championship gets underway with the pentathlon on Friday at 8:30 a.m.,
while the men’s starts at 8:45 a.m. with the heptathlon. All six men’s and
seven women’s teams from the Atlantic Sun Conference will be competing through
17 respective events, with the meet coming to a close following the awards
presentations on Saturday at 4:30 p.m.

The
ETSU men and women have enjoyed much success during the 2011-12 indoor season,
especially on the field side of the events. The Bucs have combined to earn five
Atlantic Sun Field Athlete of the Week honorees, with three of the five
competing as freshman. Through the first three weeks of the indoor season,
freshmen Katerina Vodova (Humpolec, Czech Republic), Jadon Short (Oak
Ridge, Tenn.) and K’vonte Scott (Virginia Beach, Va.) all earned the
weekly honor.

Last
year, the men’s team took home its conference-leading fourth A-Sun Championship
by scoring a combined 152 points to beat runner-up Kennesaw State by 15 points.
The Bucs and Owls have dominated the men’s side of the competition in its
six-year history, with ETSU claiming the title in 2006, ’07, ’09 and ’11, and
Kennesaw State winning the remaining two in 2008 and ’10.

ETSU
took first place in four different events on its way to last year’s men’s
title. Then-senior Michael James (Palm Bay, Fla.) won the 60m hurdles by
setting an A-Sun Indoor Championship record time of 8.02, while a second former
Buc Jarrod Burton (Bastian Va.) also set a meet record with a 17.47m
shot put. Burton’s toss bested the previous A-Sun Championship mark, set by
Burton in 2009, by one foot, 10 inches.

The
Bucs’ two other victories came in the men’s 800m, with Desmond Pierce (Morristown,
Tenn.) edging by Kennesaw State’s Gianni Catalano to win with a time of 1:54.89,
and the heptathlon. Jesse Aliaga-Jacob (Nice, France) captured the
points for ETSU in the heptathlon with 4,750 points, placing him at No. 3 in
the meet’s record books. The Bucs have controlled the event since the first
A-Sun meet in 2006, having won five of six heptathlons and holding the No. 1-4
spots in the championship meet record books.

Scott
can add to ETSU’s dominance in the heptathlon if he can repeat his performance
from earlier in the year at the CNU Captains Invitational and Multis, when he
scored 4,834 points to break Nic Chernikow’s (Seymour, Tenn.) previous
school record of 4,820, which currently sits atop the A-Sun Indoor Championship
record books. Fellow freshman Filip Jalovy (Modrice, Czech Republic) has
also shown he could set a new A-Sun meet record, having already outrun the 800m
record with a 1:53.15 showing earlier in the year. Junior Tim O’Dell (Palm
Coast, Fla.) would break the 400m record if he can repeat his 48.30 mark he set
three weeks ago on the very same track during the Niswonger Invitational.

The
women’s team will look to put an end to Jacksonville’s six-consecutive A-Sun
Indoor Championship titles. The Dolphins have owned the meet since its
inauguration in 2006, with their average margin of victory over the last six years
coming by 56.83 points. The closest JU came to losing was in ’06, when they
snuck past Florida Atlantic by 14 points (133-119). Since then, JU’s smallest
margin of victory came in 2010, when it took home the title by 57 points over
Kennesaw State (211-154).

Last year, the ETSU
women finished fourth by totaling 72 points over the two-day event. ETSU’s best
A-Sun Indoor finish came in 2007, when it totaled 81 points to tie for second
place with Belmont. The Dolphins won the meet with 150 points.

The Bucs return five
student-athletes on the women’s side that scored well last year. Sophomores
Lexie Burley
(Johnson City, Tenn.) and Bethany Lender (Altoona, Pa.) combined to
finish second and third in the triple jump, as Burley posted a jump of 38 feet,
10 inches while Lender had a jump of 38 feet, eight inches. Burley has since
eclipsed that mark by leaping 12.22m (40 feet, 1.1 inches) at this year’s
Virginia Tech Invitational. If Burley posts the same distance at the A-Sun
meet, it would place her second all-time in the meet’s record books.

Sophomore
Emani Harrison (Columbia, S.C.) came up just short in last year’s
women's 60m dash, as she tallied a lifetime best time of 7.62 but could not
edge out Jacksonville's Louise Kiernan who finished with a time of 7.59.

Senior
sisters Hannah Bowers (Jonesborough, Tenn.) and Emma Bowers
(Jonesborough, Tenn.) were part of last year’s third place 4x400m relay team.
The duo teamed with former Bucs Ashton Bishop (Gate City, Va.) and Jasmine
Ingram (Frederick, Md.) to post a time of 3:53.28 to pick up six points.

Vodova
scored 3,698 points at Penn State’s Sykes & Sabock Challenge Cup two weeks
ago, a mark that would place her first all-time at the A-Sun Indoors if she
were to repeat it this weekend.