Hoosiers send 26 to NCAA Regionals

Andy Bayer and Derek Drouin’s title defense starts now.

The two seniors, defending national champions in the 1,500-meter and the high jump, will be joined by 24 of their teammates May 23-25 in Greensboro, N.C., for the NCAA East Preliminaries, the regional qualifier for the NCAA Championships.

The Hoosiers have 28 entries in the field, as Drouin and freshman sprinter Cornelius Strickland are each entered in two events. Strickland will run both the 100-meter and 200-meter. He is coming out of a Big Ten meet in which IU Coach Ron Helmer said he didn’t run to the level that he is capable of.

Strickland finished 10th in the 100-meter prelims, failing to reach the final, then finished ninth in the finals of the 200-meter.

“Part of that is youth, part of that is doing this for the first time against a high level of competition,” Helmer said of Strickland’s Big Ten performance. “You just never get a day off. You never get an easy meet. In high school they get ready for the big ones because there aren’t very many big ones. Here, the little ones are big ones and so I think that’s hard sometimes for freshmen.”

Helmer said he expects Strickland to bounce back this weekend, and he believes he learned a lot from his performance at the Big Ten meets.

Helmer added he doesn’t plan to say anything different to Strickland to get him ready for the meet this weekend. He has been  impressed by Strickland’s work ethic all year long, especially for a freshman.

“I don’t think we need to do anything other than just let it be what it is because I think he had his moment where things didn’t come together for him mentally in the Big Ten meet,” Helmer said. “You kind of bounce off the bottom when that happens, and I don’t think people who are made like him are typically going to take that one bad weekend and allow it to affect them as they go forward.

“Typically guys like that, they’ll bounce a little bit, they’ll take their lumps, and it’s almost like they’ll relax, and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose. I know I’m better than that. Let me go run.’ I think that’s probably what’s going to happen.”

For the first time, Drouin will be working to gain a chance at a national championship in not just the high jump, but the 110-meter hurdles as well.

“I think as much as anything with him, it’s a chance to do an event other than the high jump for probably the last time in his track and field career,” Helmer said. “He very well could have several more years, a lot more years of track and field, so this chance to do this event that he’s gotten pretty good at one more time I think was a challenge that appealed to him.

“It was him who wanted to do that. It wasn’t us saying, ‘You need to run the hurdles again.’ It was him saying, ‘You know what, I really want to run the hurdles again.’ I think it’s the challenge of it that appealed to him, and that’s why we like him.”

In addition to expecting big results from Drouin, Bayer and indoor high jump champion Emma Kimoto, Helmer said he is also expecting big results from both the men’s and women’s steeplechasers.

He said the field is not as strong at the top, and he thinks junior Robby Nierman and freshman Josh Roche, who finished second and third respectively at the Big Ten Championships, could claim some of those spots and advance to the NCAA Championships.

With just this meet, and, hopefully, the NCAA Championships remaining, Bayer said he’s starting to get a little sad  about the end of his career.

Coming off of Big Ten wins in both the 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter, he said he feels comfortable going into the weekend.

“Now kind of everything I do is last time around; last Big Tens, last regionals, hopefully last NCAAs,” Bayer said. “It’s kind of sad. I’m looking forward to what lies ahead and hopefully running professionally, but it’ll be sad to not have the team and it’ll be different. It’ll be weird not competing for IU and competing for a team.”