TicketsFAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Cincinnati junior track and field star Juliette Laracuente-Huebner broke her own school record for the second time this season, finishing with 4,442 points and a third-place finish for First-Team All-America accolades at the NCAA Indoor Championships.
The junior from Marengo, Ohio, now has four All-America nods to her name, with two each in indoor and outdoor.
"Coming into today, I really just wanted to win a trophy, especially after last year where I was out of the NCAA meet by one point and one place," Laracuente-Huebner said. "I knew today it was going to come down to the 800, and when that first gun came up and we kind of came back, I knew how everyone was going to run the race, and I knew that sticking to the back and running how I needed to run was the smartest thing to do.
"Coach (Chris) Wineberg said he was scared I was running very slow, but I was right on pace and slowly started passing people and ran my season's best for indoor. The third-place finish was 300 points higher than I had last year, and I'm just really glad to have this."
Laracuente-Huebner this season became the first Bearcat to qualify for the indoor pentathlon nationals since Jasmine Cotten in 2009 and 2012, who earned All-America honors in the latter.
She is the 58th All-American at Cincinnati (spanning cross country, indoor and outdoor) since the 2015 season, when head coach Susan Seaton first took over in an interim role and later the permanent post in 2016.
"I was super excited for Juliette," Seaton said. "She set a nice school-record PR, and in all of her events she was pretty much in the top-five all the way throughout the meet. We are all so proud of her, and Coach Wineberg put in so much hard work with her to shine on this big stage. We are so proud of our new third-place finisher at the NCAA Championship."
Laracuente-Huebner's events went in the following order, with placements in parenthesis:
60-meter hurdles: 8.28 (third)
High Jump: 1.72m (seventh)
Shot Put: 12.34m (fourth)
Long Jump: 6.30m (fourth)
800-meter: 2:16.59 (sixth)
Cincinnati begins its outdoor season at the Raleigh Relays at N.C. State from March 26-28.