Sprints and multis stand out for Pride track and field at Augustana Meet of Champions

ROCK ISLAND, Ill. - In their second trip to Rock Island, Ill. for an Augustana College hosted outdoor meet, the Clarke University track and field teams took part in the Augustana Meet of Champions on both Friday and Saturday.

Starting with the primary reason it was a two-day event, Pride decathlon athletes Nick Zaprianov and Deshawn Rucker finished in third and 11th place respectively with Zaprianov scoring 5707 points over the 10 events, producing his most points in a singlular event with 755 in both the 100-meter dash and 400-meter dash while Rucker's best scoring event was also the 100-meter dash with 701 points while also posting a personal best shot put of 12.40 meters to grab 631 points in that event.

Sprinting well was a theme of the weekend with the lone school record to fall at the meet came in the men's 4x100-meter relay when the four-man team of Gavayne Smith, Joshua Musonda, Bradey Huseman, and Jake Etherington earned a 41.41 time in the race to win the event by nearly a half of a second over the runner-up team.

Tiana Culmer and Hannah Quang also performed well in women's sprinting events as Culmer ran to a fifth place finish in the 100-meter finals at a 12.39-second time to improve on her qualifying time by 0.16 of a second while Quang ran strong hurdle events, finishing in third in the 100-meter hurdles with a time of 15.76 while also posting a 400-meter hurdles time at 1:16.08.

Full meet results for the Pride athletes who competed can be found here: https://results.wayzatatiming.com/meets/68131/teams/1563560

Clarke will participate in one more week's worth of events before they prepare for the conference meet when they send certain athletes to the Drake Relays over Apr. 23-25 along with other competitors staying in Dubuque to participate in the University of Dubuque hosted Battle in the Bluffs on Apr. 23.