HOUSTON, Texas- With Tuesday's announcement of track and field participants, the University of Indianapolis will be sending 22 student-athletes in five sports to the NCAA Division II Winter Sports Festival in Houston, Texas Mar. 11-14.
Willie Little and Sam Elmore will represent the men's track team in the weight throw. Both earned their right to go to the national meet with their efforts at the recently-completed Great Lakes Valley Conference championships, where Little won the event with an automatically-qualifying mark while Elmore notched a provisional and was selected to compete on Tuesday.
The women's track team will take three athletes for the championship meet. Amy Schmitz is seeded third in the weight throw (18.70m) and Andrea Horban is fifth on the list in the shot put (14.50m). Emily Schaf also made the field in the women's high jump with her 1.71-meter mark earlier in the season.
The UIndy wrestling team will have two representatives in Houston in Cory Fornal and Matt Irwin. Both wrestlers finished runner-up in their respective weight classes at the NCAA Super Regional 2 tournament on Sunday. Irwin, who ranks in the top 10 in wins (all Divisions) in the 141-lb. class, is making his second NCAA nationals appearance. Fornal will be making his first trip after scaling-up the 157-lb. bracket at the regional, finishing second despite a No. 6 seeding heading into the tournament.
A whopping 15 student-athletes from both men's and women's swimming will make the trek to the University of Houston for the four-day championship. UIndy is looking to continue its impressive string of top-15 national finishes with the men doing so in each of the last nine seasons and the women grabbing eight straight places in the top 12.
Competition from the 2009 Division II National Championships Festival March 11-14 in Houston will be streamed live online at NCAA.com. Coverage will include four days of swimming and diving competition and two days of both wrestling and track and field. Links to each day’s video coverage can be found
here.
This is the first winter-sports version of the popular festival format that crowns multiple champions at one location. The festival launched in Orlando in spring 2005, followed by a fall-sports version in 2006 and another spring festival in 2008.