Track Teams Ready to Start Season

PROVO – After several months of training, the BYU men’s and women’s track and field teams will open up the 2012 indoor season at the annual BYU Cougar Indoor Invitational beginning Friday and continuing into Saturday.

“This first meet will be very low key, local meet,” women’s head coach Patrick Shane said. “It will give us a look at our power people and some of our younger, developing distance runners, as well as some of our freshmen and redshirt freshmen.”

Both teams are competing outside the Mountain West Conference for the first time since 1999 and will be looking to prepare for the tough competition in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. This first meet will serve as a barometer for the coaches as they prepare for the rest of the season.

“The purpose of the opening meet is to give us a starting point,” Shane said. “You can workout all you want but you really never know what you have until the team starts competing. Competition has a way of revealing character traits that are not always obvious in practice.”

The University of Utah and Utah Valley University will also be competing in the meet, along with a large number of unattached athletes. BYU dominated the competition last year at the Cougar Invitational and will look to start the 2012 season in the same way.

Field events, along with the women’s pentathlon and the men’s heptathlon, will begin on Friday at noon MST while all running events will take place on Saturday beginning at 12:45 p.m. The meet will conclude with the women’s 4x400m relay on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. All events will take place in the Smith Fieldhouse.