Team splits to Texas, Eastern Illinois

The men's track and field team continues its series of road meets this weekend. Half of the team will travel to the Texas Relays while the other half will attend the Eastern Illinois Invitational.\nThe team expects strong competition at Texas across the board. Last weekend at the Florida Relays, the team had several athletes meet their regional provisional qualifying marks and coach Marshall Goss said that due to the quality of the opposition, he expects more to do the same this weekend. Texas, the host of the meet, finished tied for 11th place at the indoor NCAA Championships.\n"Texas Relays is probably better competition than at NCAAs," senior Matt Harris said. "The main goal is to see who we're going to have for Big Tens. Everything is focused for Big Tens."\nGoss said that those who travel to Eastern Illinois will also see solid performances. He said that Eastern Illinois has a strong team and several others will post impressive performances.\n"It will be like Purdue last week, but it will be a much better quality of meet with Eastern Illinois, Indiana State and Marquette being there," Goss said. "What we're basically doing is bringing people where they will really be competitive."\nGoss said that the team needs as many people as possible to meet the regional provisional standards. He said that if athletes get their marks early then that will relieve pressure at the end of the season. He also said that he is confident that the team can qualify a considerable number of athletes.\n"We should be bringing three people in most of the events," Goss said. "But with the standard, if we are ready for Big Tens, we'll get the standard so we don't have to worry about that so much right now. It'll just relieve a bit of the pressure later on."\nThe Texas Relays will not keep a team score, so athletes will be able to concentrate solely on their individual events. The Eastern Illinois Invitational will keep team scores, but Goss said that the team is not worried about placement as they are not sending the entire team.\nThe outdoor season has opened with challenging contests and the trend will continue in the upcoming weeks. It is quite different than the indoor season, which started loaded with dual meets.\n"The main thing with the high quality meets is that we get to go down to the warm weather places, and it really does a lot for the guys," Goss said.\nThe team struggled at the end of the outdoor season before their ninth place finish at the NCAA Championships. The team finished the season reeling from injury. Now healthy, the team has its sights set on a Big Ten Championship.\n"It's been aggravating being injured," freshman sprinter Andre Grimes said. "I think this is going to help a lot. The coaches have been putting me in longer events, trying to make me stronger and I think it's been helping a lot."\nNext week the team will race at home for the first time of the season with a dual meet involving Central Michigan and Indiana State University. Goss said that Central Michigan has put together a very solid team and that he expects the team competition to be a battle.