GAMBIER, Ohio – This afternoon, the Kenyon College women's indoor track and field team competed in the first day of the 2024 North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC) Indoor Track and Field Championships from Barrett A. Toan Indoor Track inside Kenyon's Lowry Center. 

After Friday's events, the Owls collected 15 points, setting the team in 6th place ahead of tomorrow's finals. Wittenberg (71.50), DePauw (47), Ohio Wesleyan (41.5) and Wooster (27) sit in the top half of the leaderboard after day one, and Denison (16), Kenyon (15), Oberlin (14), and Hiram (2) round out the latter half. 

Paula Soric captured Kenyon's lone victory on Friday in one of her historically dominant events, the long jump. On her fifth jump out of six, Soric recorded her conference-winning leap of 5.29 meters (17-4 ¼), seizing the long jump crown for the second year in a row and improving on last year's length by nearly half a foot. The long jump win marks the junior's third conference championship victory.

On the track, while most events were prelims for tomorrow's action, Kenyon picked up five more points in the distance medley relay, as the team of Lorien Kauffman, Anna Brown, Rigby Zentner, and Olivia Ide ran a 12:54.07 race and finished fourth out of eight teams. 

The Owls finished just outside the top eight in the other point-scoring event, as Penny Griffioen took tenth in the 5,000-meter with a 19:25.85 time. 

In the prelim races, Kauffman and Brown will represent the Owls in the 800-meter on Saturday after Kauffman finished first with a speedy 2:21.31 mark, besting 11 other conference competitors. Brown was not far behind, taking third in the race as she finished her two laps in 2:22:09.

First-year Caroline Hitsman narrowly missed qualifying in the 60 and 200-meter sprints, finishing just seven-hundredths of a second behind the last qualifying placement in the 60 and less than a second behind in the 200.

Day two of the NCAC Indoor Track and Field Championships will commence at 10 a.m. from the Toan Indoor Track with the rest of the field events. The track events will start at 2:15 p.m.