WIAC Sweeps Division III Indoor Coach of the Year Awards
NEW ORLEANS – Wisconsin-La Crosse’s women and Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s men each won their first-ever NCAA Division III indoor track & field team titles last weekend, and their coaching staffs were thusly recognized by their peers. The coaching body voted La Crosse women’s head coach Pat Healy women’s National Coach of the Year and his assistant Katie Wagner as National Assistant Coach of the Year; Eau Claire head Chip Schneider and assistant Jeremy Deterville won the same honors for men’s coaches.
Healy coached the La Crosse women to their third straight WIAC title and first ever NCAA title in 2015. The La Crosse programs have fistfuls of national titles in men’s and women’s cross country and outdoor track & field and men’s indoor track & field, but this is the first-ever women’s indoor championship since joining the NCAA. He has been the women’s head track coach at UWL since 1991, and was the cross country coach from 1991-2011.
The Eagles beat out conference rivals and perennial national title contenders UW-Oshkosh 55-49 for the win. How did they do it? Meg Heafy delivered a runner-up finish in the 200 and Laura Mead matched those eight points with two fifth-place finishes in the 3000 and 5000. And for the third straight year, an Eagle quartet won the 4×400.
That’s without covering the major points put up by athletes under assistant coach Katie Wagner’s purview. The Women’s Assistant COY had athletes win the triple jump (Bria Halama), take third in the hurdles (Claire Gordee, leading a 3-5-6 La Crosse finish), and take fifth in the long jump (Bailey Alston, who was also seventh in the triple). Wagner’s jumpers and hurdlers scored 29 points, which would have been seventh in the nation as a team.
Chip Schneider’s Eau Claire men beat out La Crosse for the national title by two points—a margin in a two-day track meet that is fundamentally the matter of a few tenth of a second here or a couple centimeters there. Crucial to the win were distance runner Josh Thorson—third in the 3000 and the anchor of the winning DMR—shot put champ Roger Steen, and heptathlon winner Brandon Zarnoth. The shot and hep were particularly deep events for Eau Claire, as they went 1-3 in the shot and 1-2 in the hep. Greg Peterson kicking hard to win the heptathlon 1k by two seconds and move up to take second place by five points (out of more than five thousand) is among probably a dozen zero-sum moments that won the meet for Eau Claire.
The Blugolds’ sprinters—under the direction of Jeremy Deterville–heavily contributed to the squad’s first-ever indoor or outdoor national title. Thurgood Dennis took second in the 60 and Cody Prince was sixth in the 400 meters. Both of them ran the nation’s fastest regular season times in those events this winter.