Michigan
NCAA East Preliminaries
Nationals Berths at Stake for Michigan Men
5/23/2022 12:52:00 PM | Men's Track & Field
THIS WEEK
Wed-Fri., May 25-27 -- at NCAA East Preliminaries (Bloomington, Ind.) | Meet Central
Wednesday, May 25 -- at NCAA East Preliminaries, 2Â p.m.
TV: IUHoosiers.com | Live Results | Live Video
Friday, May 27 -- at NCAA East Preliminaries, 2:30 p.m.
TV: IUHoosiers.com | Live Results | Live Video
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Berths to the NCAA Championships will be at stake this Wednesday and Friday (May 25 and 27) as the University of Michigan men's track and field heads to Bloomington, Ind., for the NCAA East Preliminary Rounds to kick off the national postseason.
Fifteen Wolverine entries will battle the NCAA East Region's best in 10 different events to be among the 12 per event who will advance to the national championships at Oregon, scheduled for June 8-11.
Men will compete at the NCAA East Prelims on Wednesday and Friday, with the women set to go Thursday and Saturday (May 26 and 28) to reflect the schedule layout that will be used at Oregon.
Track events shorter than 3,000 meters will feature two rounds of qualifying, and longer events will only include one round. Field events will be conducted in a truncated one-round format, wherein the vertical jumps continue only until a clear top 12 has been determined and the horizontal jumps will conclude after only three qualifying rounds.
Big Ten champion and record-setting hurdler Joshua Zeller leads the Michigan delegation to Indiana's Robert C. Haugh Track and Field Complex, who all qualified for the East Prelims by virtue of being among the top 48 individuals or top 24 relay teams declared to compete in their respective events.
Recent Big Ten medalists Cole Johnson and Miles Brown (800 meters), Dubem Amene (400 meters), Christian Hubaker (steeplechase) and Cassidy Henshaw (high jump) also headline the group, along with past medalists Nick Foster (1,500 meters), Tom Brady (10,000 meters) and Joost Plaetinck (steeplechase) and multiple-time All-American Tom Dodd (1,500 meters).
Rounding out the contingent are Henry Sheldon (pole vault), Austin Remick (steeplechase), Bera Ajala (triple jump), Job Mayhue (110-meter hurdles) and the 4x400 relay team of Jacob Koerner, Brown, Lawrence Gilliam and Amene.
Wednesday for Michigan will start at 6 p.m. and include first-round qualifying action in the 110-meter hurdles (6 p.m.), 1,500 meters (6:30 p.m.), 400 meters (7:25 p.m.) and 800 meters (7:50 p.m.). Nationals berths will immediately be at stake in the pole vault (6:30 p.m.) and 10,000 meters (9:10 p.m.).
Friday action begins at 2:30 p.m. with the high jump, followed by a track program that will begin at 5:15 p.m. with the quarterfinals of the 1,500 meters. That program will also include decisive quarterfinals in the steeplechase (5:40 p.m.), 110-meter hurdles (6:15 p.m.), 400 meters (6:50 p.m.), 800 meters (7:05 p.m.) and 4x400 relay (8:45 p.m.). Meanwhile, qualifying in the triple jump is set for 6 p.m.
Both days of competition will be streamed online for free via IUHoosiers.com.
Live results will be provided through Flash Results. Updates will be posted to the official Michigan track and field social media channels throughout the day.
Notes
• Four men -- Zeller, Dodd, Plaetinck and Hubaker -- will be looking to advance to the NCAA Outdoor Championships for the second straight season. Hubaker earned second team All-America honors last season, while the other three were honorable mention.
• The entire NCAA Indoor Championships qualifying contingent -- Zeller, Brown, Johnson, Amene, Foster and Dodd -- is still alive and aiming to clinch berths to the outdoor championships.
• Among those currently seeded in the top 12 -- the cutoff for advancing to the NCAA Championships in each event -- Zeller is ranked No. 2 in the 110 hurdles and Dodd is No. 10 at 1,500 meters.
• Entering on the bubble are No. 14 Henshaw in the high jump, No. 15 Brown at 800 meters, No. 15 Foster at 1,500 meters, No. 18 Johnson at 800 meters, and No. 22 Amene at 400 meters.
• Zeller is the strongest challenger in the group, entering with the No. 2 rank in both the NCAA East Region and the NCAA overall with his record-setting 13.19 (+1.6m/s) win at the Big Ten Championships two weekends ago. Not only was it a meet record, but it was the top individual performance of all time at the Big Ten Championships based on the World Athletics scoring tables that are used to compare marks across events. In all of Big Ten history, only three men have posted scores equal to or greater than the 1,218 points assigned to his performance.
• Zeller is looking to clinch a qualifying performance to Oregon for the second time in three weekends. At Big Tens, he eclipsed the 2022 World Championships qualifying standard of 13.32, making himself automatically eligible for selection by Team Great Britain to compete at the meet, to be hosted at Oregon, in July. He is the fifth-fastest Briton and the 21st-fastest European in history.
• Dodd has competed in every NCAA Track and Field Championships since his arrival at Michigan in the fall of 2020, and is looking to extend that streak to four in a row. He was a first team All-American miler indoors in 2021, was honorable mention at 1,500 meters outdoors that spring, and ran a leg of the first team All-America distance medley relay team at the 2022 indoor meet.
Players Mentioned
