Track & field teams host NESCAC Championships on Saturday
LEWISTON, Maine — What promises to be an exciting, impressive and long day of track and field action is nearly upon the campus of Bates College: Bates will host the 2012 NESCAC Outdoor Track & Field Championships this Saturday, April 28, at Russell Street Track, starting at 9am.
Event Performance Lists (Available at 12pm Friday)
Read the NESCAC’s preview story on the meet.
Sam Goldstein '12, Bates' No. 2 all-time pole vaulter, aims for his first All-NESCAC honor at Bates' home track on Saturday. (File photo by Tom Leonard '78)
By any definition, the 11 institutions competing at the meet comprise one of the top collections of track and field teams in Division III. Currently the NESCAC is rated fourth in both men’s and women’s track and field by the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association’s computer rankings of relative conference strength, based on projected finishes at the NCAA Division III Championships.
The Bates men’s team, which has claimed the NESCAC Championship once, in 2000, took second place in 2011 for the second time in three years, trailing only Williams, which has won or shared the title in every year since 2000 (as well as every year from 1992 to 1999).
In last year’s meet at Wesleyan, the Bobcats scored 122.5 points, topping third-place Middlebury (112.5) by 10 points. Tufts (99.5) and Amherst (65) rounded out the top five teams out of 11 competing. Seventeenth-year head coach Al Fereshetian was voted NESCAC Men’s Track and Field Coach of the Year, beginning a string of similar awards for Fereshetian (2011 NESCAC Men’s Cross Country Coach of the Year and 2012 USTFCCCA New England Region Indoor Track and Field Coach of the Year).
The Bates women’s team finished sixth at last year’s NESCAC Championship, eight points behind fifth-place Bowdoin and ahead of Amherst, Trinity, Wesleyan and Hamilton. The Bobcats took fourth place in 2010, their best finish since 1989.