Lopes look to extend historic WAC winning streak

The Grand Canyon track and field team is headed to compete at the WAC Indoor Track and Field Championships on Monday and Tuesday as the men's and women's favorites in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Lopes will compete for their eighth straight men's championship, and the women will hope to win for their sixth time in the last eight, as teams compete at \Albuquerque Convention Center.

"I am very excited and confident in both of our teams' ability to have very successful WAC Indoor Championships meets again this year," GCU head coach Tom Flood said.

The Lopes swept the Pre-Championship Coaches Polls that were released on Thursday.

"All the WAC schools, especially the Texas schools, SFA, UT Arlington and Abilene Christian, plus Southern Utah and Utah Valley; have had long traditions of excellence in track and field and are always very tough competition," Flood said.

The Lopes had a phenomenal regular season full of 12 school records.

"Our men's team is very well balanced with good depth in most event areas, especially the 200, 400, 800 meters, pole vault and multis," Flood said. "We have good mixture of senior leadership and some very talented newcomers."

If the men win this indoor championship, it will add to their streak of the most consecutive men's indoor titles won by a WAC program since BYU swept the competition for 10 seasons from 1990 to 1999.

"Our women's team is still fairly young this year, with a lot of outstanding newcomers," Flood said. "Everyone here is ready to leave it all out on the track and fight until the last event and bring back our winning track and field tradition for our lady Lopes."

This will mark the fourth time GCU has been to Albuquerque during this indoor season.

The following Lopes men have the best times and marks in the conference: JoJo Harding (60 meters), Erin Brown (200), Germain Lemaitre (800), Daviciea McCartney (60 hurdles), Jack Hodge (pole vault) and Casey Tow (heptathlon).

For the women, the top spots are held by Neysia Howard (200 and long jump), Nicole Prall (pole vault), Onome Ogbeni (shot put and weight throw) and Summer Grubbs (pentathlon).

"Both teams know that no one is going to just hand them anything and that they are going to have to fight for every point they get," Flood said. "As always, we will have to battle in every single event to the best of our abilities and let the games committee keep track of the team scores."

The Lopes have taken 13 out of the 24 indoor WAC weekly awards this indoor season.

"Hopefully, if it's God's will, we will be traveling back home with some additional hardware," Flood said.

Live results can be found here.

ESPN+ broadcasts will be available here. The ESPN+ broadcasts will also be available on WACinternational.tv to viewers outside the US here.

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Players Mentioned

Erin Brown

Summer Grubbs

JoJo Harding

Jack Hodge

Neysia Howard

Germain Lemaitre

Daviciea McCartney

Onome Ogbeni

Nicole Prall

Casey Tow

Grand Canyon University Athletics