KEENE, N.H. – One of the first Sundays in March is always an anxious time for every indoor track and field athlete – did they do enough to earn a chance to compete for a national championship? Were any new qualifying marks set in the final meets later on Saturday to bump other competitors down? When the dust settled, there will be representation from both the Keene State College men's and women's indoor track and field teams when the NCAA championships open this coming Friday and Saturday (March 13-14) at the Crossplex in Birmingham, Alabama.
Senior
Molly Lu McKellar has qualified in the women's pentathlon with her converted 3,471 point effort at the New England Division III championships on February 27. It was more than a 200-point improvement from her effort at Bates College in January and landed her in the top 20 nationally – amongst the automatic qualifiers – where she has remained since. With a strong day on Friday, she could threaten former individual national champion Janel Haggerty's 2013 school record. McKellar's appearance will mark the first at the NCAA championship for an Owl on the women's side since Lauren Perkowski in 2019 and is just the second since 2014. From 2000 through 2014, KSC had qualifications in all but one year at the women's championship, finishing as high as a fourth-place tie twice in the team scoring.
The pentathlon will commence with the 60-meter hurdles at 10:20 a.m., followed by the high jump at about 11:20 a.m., the shot put at 1:05 p.m., the long jump at 2:35 p.m., and the 800 meters at about 4:20 p.m. Junior Elaina Styer of Stockton University enters the event as the national top seed with her 3,747-point mark. Jordan Murphy of the University of Hartford, who edged McKellar at the Division III New England championships, is the No. 6 seed.
On the men's side, junior
Tyler Bolaske will once again take the national stage when he races in the mile. The preliminary race is set to begin at 2:50 p.m. on Friday, with the final set for Saturday at 4:10 p.m. The Palmer, Mass. native ran the event in a converted time of 4:07.84 at the Little East Conference championship on February 21 as the Owl men took home their first title since 2008 and figures to challenge in a field where the No. 2 through No. 20 seeds are separated by less than five seconds. Nicholas Lyndaker of St. Lawrence University is the national top seed with his seed time of 3:59.42. Bolaske is making his second NCAA championship appearance of the season after also traveling to cross country nationals in November.
The KSC men will be appearing at the NCAA indoor track championships for the 17th time since joining Division III in 1997-1998 and for the third time since the change of the decade. Last year,
Aidan Law qualified in the long jump while Ben Musese made it in the triple jump in 2020 before the championship was later cancelled.
"I am excited that both our men's and women's teams will have representation at the NCAA championship this year. We have had a historic year and while we will have two athletes competing, it is a full team effort to get there," said Keene State head coach
Dan Roark. "I am proud of the work Molly Lu and Tyler put in to get here. We have had others that had really good showings that were just off the mark or dealing with injuries at the end, but this is a group I am proud of from top to bottom."
Law, who finished 11th in the long jump last year in Rochester at the NCAA championship and barely missed the finals, also had a national-qualifying mark of 7.19 meters this year but was unable to declare due to an injury suffered at the Tufts National Qualifying Meet on Saturday.
This weekend will mark the first time in 12 years that both KSC men's and women's teams will have representation at the NCAA championships in the same season.
The meet schedule and broadcast will be available at ncaa.com.
