Although the Hillsdale College men’s track and field team didn’t do as well as they would have hoped at the NCAA D-II Indoor National Championship last weekend — scoring only 4 points as opposed to last year’s 18 — there were still a number of positive takeaways from the meet.
The distance medley relay team ran a season-best time of 9:50.23, breaking their own school record which they set only two weeks prior at the GLIAC Conference Championship, to earn All-American honors.
Coming into the national meet, sophomore Jared Schipper hoped to compete for national championship, but couldn’t put together the vaults needed to win. Despite jumping 0.26 meters below his best height, Schipper managed to become an All-American by securing an eighth-place finish.
Even though the 4×400 relay team was kept out of scoring position, placing ninth in the race, they broke the school record, running the event in 3:12.59.
Of the nine men that competed at the national meet, just one is a senior — DMR 400-meter leg runner Noah Hiser — while the other eight will be eligible to compete at indoor nationals next year if they qualify again.
“Same as the ladies, the men did a great job of prepping themselves going in and were very confident in their game plan,” men’s distance coach Joe Lynn said. “To have two relays at the NCAA meet is a testament to the talent and depth that our men’s program has.”
Lynn thought the men’s DMR team of junior Caleb Gatchell (1200M), Hiser (400M), freshman Tanner Schwannecke (800M), and sophomore Tony Wondaal (1600M) had a shot to win the race because everyone on the team raced “fresh” while other teams raced athletes who had already competed that day. The team was ranked eighth coming into the meet but placed sixth and finished just over two seconds behind the national champions.
“The DMR came in with the expectation to be in the mix. We’d been racing to the level of the top teams around us all year, so coming in we knew anything was possible,” Lynn said. “Having a fresh team helped with our confidence too, because a lot of teams had substitutions or had athletes who were coming back off a prelim.”
Gatchell was also proud of how his team competed in the race, even though he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his individual performance.
“It was okay, it wasn’t great,” Gatchell said. “It was a big day, and as a program you pride yourself on being able to step up. We were right there with the best teams in the country.”
Gatchell highlighted Wondaal’s anchor leg as a particularly important part of the relay as he hung tight with D-II’s fastest miler, Oliver Aitchison, who broke 4 minutes in the mile earlier in the season.
“I was more nervous, more scared, and more excited than I’ve been all season,” Wondaal said. “I was more scared of not running what I know I can do, than I was of those elite milers that were anchoring the DMR with me.”
During his 1600-meter anchor leg, about nine meters shorter than a full mile, Wondaal split 4:04, which at the speed he was going is equivalent to running the mile in about 4:05.5. This is about seven seconds faster than he went in his last mile race and a whole 20 seconds faster than he ran during his first race of the season.
Improving as drastically as he did in an event as short as the mile is not an easy feat.
“I was just hoping to break 4:30 in my first mile,” Wondaal said.
Gatchell’s goal is to win the DMR next year at indoor nationals.
“Each of the four legs brought something different to the table for the group and that is why they were on the relay,” Lynn said.
The Chargers will compete in their first outdoor meet on April 2 at the Miami Invitational in Oxford, Ohio.