About 60 members of the Chadron State College track and field team are scheduled to open the outdoor season on Saturday. Most of them will be at Colorado State-Pueblo while the others, mostly multi-events athletes and pole vaulters, will be at Black Hills State in Spearfish.
The Pueblo meet usually draws the Division I teams from Colorado along with many of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference teams besides the Eagles.
CSC Head Coach Riley Northrup said the Eagles won’t quite be at full strength yet, but standouts such as sprinter Brodie Roden and long jumper Nashaun Jernigan are improving after missing the indoor season because of injuries.
“Brodie is coming around and will run in the 4×100-meter relay at Pueblo if everything goes as planned,” Northrup said. “Naishaun says his knee is feeling better, but he’s still rehabbing and we’ll be cautious with him. Maybe we could say he’s ‘week-to-week’,” the coach added.
Roden, the Outstanding Male Athletic at the 2020 RMAC Indoor Meet, broke a toe during a weightlifting accident last fall and then contracted a stubborn case of COVID in December. Jernigan, the bronze medal long jumper at the NCAA II National Outdoor Meet last May, tore an ACL while playing pick-up basketball last summer.
Northrup added that Morgan Fawver, who is both a sprinter and a long jumper, seems to be fully recovered from the hamstring issue that kept him from competing for about six weeks late in the indoor season. He was able the long jump at the recent NCAA II Indoor Meet and has not any problems while preparing for the outdoor schedule.
The coach said he’s unsure of where the Eagles will compete this spring, depending mostly on the weather forecasts. A meet at South Dakota Mines in Rapid City on April 9 is on the schedule. Other leading possibilities include a pre-conference meet at Colorado Mines on April 22. The RMAC Meet will be at Black Hills State in Spearfish on April 29-May 1.