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CINCINNATI - Director of Track and Field/Cross Country Susan Seaton and the University of Cincinnati track and field teams released their 2016 indoor and outdoor schedules on Thursday afternoon. The schedule is the most competitive slate in program history and features top-tier competition and several high-profile meets.
"Our schedule this year is the most competitive schedule we have ever had in the history of the program," said Seaton, . "We are going to compete against a lot of Power 5 conference schools and we are really excited about that because it will help our team to make that next step toward competing at the national level."
The Bearcats open the indoor season at the UK Invitational on Jan. 15-16, before traveling back to Lexington, Kentucky, for the prestigious Rod McCravy Memorial on Jan. 22 and 23. The tough January slate continues at the Indiana Relays on Jan. 29-30, where UC will compete against the likes of Indiana, Alabama, Notre Dame and Columbia. Also highlighted in the indoor season are the Armory Track Invitational (Feb. 5), the Tyson Invitational (Feb. 12) and the SPIRE DI Invitational (Feb. 12-13).
"During the indoor season, we are continuing to go to meets in our region," said Seaton. "We are able to compete at high level meets at Kentucky as well as Indiana, but we also are going to continue competing at national meets like the Armory Track Invitational and the Spire Division I Invitational, as well as adding the Tyson Invitational onto the schedule for our top level athletes and potential national qualifiers."
Cincinnati will have eight meets in total to prepare for the American Athletic Conference Indoor Track and Field Championships which take place in Birmingham, Alabama, on Feb. 28-29.
"The indoor conference championship will be hosted for the first time at the Crossplex in Birmingham," said Seaton. "We are excited to try out that new facility and this meet should give us the opportunity to compete at the highest level. Of course, we are really excited to duke it out with our conference opponents and hopefully bring home a trophy on both sides."
The outdoor season begins on March 25-26 at both the Hurricane Twilight Meet in Miami, Florida, and the Raleigh Relays in Raleigh, N.C. The opening meets lead up to the annual Oliver Nikoloff Invitational, hosted at Gettler Stadium on the UC campus.
"We are hosting the Oliver Nikoloff again this year and are bringing in a number of quality teams," said Seaton. "There will be about eight teams participating so it should be a quality meet for the early season. We are really excited also to welcome our alumni back for that meet. There will be a big alumni event the night before the meet as well as during the meet on Saturday and we are really excited to have that going on as well."
Meets at the Tennessee and Kentucky highlight a slate of nine outdoor meets prior to the American Championships in Orlando, Florida. "The outdoor conference championships are at UCF, where we have been for multiple years for our spring break trip" Seaton noted. "We are very familiar with the settings there and hope that will help us in preparation for the outdoor championships."
Additionally, the 2016 season will be focused with an end goal of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janiero, Brazil. "This is an Olympic year," said Seaton, "so for us in the track world, this is pretty important. We think we have a few athletes that have the potential to qualify for the Olympic trials, and we already have two athletes qualified for that competition. We also have a foreign athlete, Adrian Valles, who competed at the World Championships last year and we believe he can achieve the Olympic Qualifying standard. So we also want to point towards the end of the season where the Olympic trials will take place and hopefully we will have some Bearcats compete at the Olympics."