SAN ANTONIO — The UTSA track & field teams will host the UTSA Invitational this Friday-Saturday, March 15-16, at Park West Athletics Complex. Admission and parking are free.
The Roadrunners will welcome Kentucky, Purdue, Texas, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and UTRGV to the Alamo City for their outdoor season opener and the first of back-to-back home meets.
The two-day meet will get underway at 1 p.m. Friday with the hammer throw followed by the shot put, while the javelin is on the docket for 5 p.m. Four distance races — the men's and women's 2,000-meter steeplechase and 5,000m—are slated to start at 8 p.m.
Saturday's field events will begin at 11 a.m. and the running events will start at 2 p.m. on a rolling schedule.
The men won last year's UTSA Invitational with 181 points to finish 21 points ahead of Purdue behind gold-medal performances from Derek Fenton (shot put), Andre Douglas (triple jump), Vasha Sheriff (400m), Patrick Prince (110m hurdles) and the 4x100m relay team of Kaleb Campbell, Jared Taylor, Jayden Bunting and Desmond Jefferson.
The women scored 96 points to place fourth behind Purdue, Texas Tech and Alabama at last year's meet. The Roadrunners had a quintet of podium finishes, including bronze medals in both the 4x100m and 4x400m relays and from Gabriyella Torres in the high jump.
The Roadrunners last competed as a team at the Conference USA Indoor Championships on Feb. 16-17 in Birmingham, Ala. The men finished third behind wins from C-USA Freshman of the Meet Gary Haasbroek (heptathlon) and Luca Chatham (mile), while the women placed seventh on the strength of gold medals won by Danielle Spence (triple jump) and Torres (pentathlon).
Haasbroek and Spence collected second-team All-America accolades at the NCAA Indoor Championships last weekend in Birmingham. Haasbroek, who hails from Melbourne, Australia, scored 5,601 points to finish 10th in the heptathlon, while Spence, a sophomore from Jamaica, skipped to a 13th-place mark of 12.80m (42-0) in the triple jump.
