NEW ORLEANS – The Winona State track and field team sent six Warriors to the NCAA Division II Indoor Championship Friday and Saturday in Birmingham, Ala. and came home with six All-Americans to show for it.
The USTFCCCA announced today that Kelsey Bethke, Kaitlyn Long, Alissa Rausch, Brittany Schyvinck, Megan Seidl and Catherine Whitcomb each earned first team All-America honors for their performance at the NCAA Championship.
Long began what would be a fantastic weekend for the Warriors, winning the National Championship in the weight throw event with a throw of 68' 8 ¾". The throw broke the school record and was the second farthest in NCAA Indoor Championship history, beating four of the top seven weight throwers in Division II championship history in the process.
Rausch, it turns out, earned second team All-America honors in the same event with a 12th-place finish. Rausch turned that into a first team honor the next day, however, securing a fourth-place finish in the Shot Put with a toss of 49' 7 ¼".
The 4x400 relay team of Bethke, Schyvinck, Seidl and Whitcomb capped off WSU's stellar performance with a fourth-place finish of their own to each earn first team All-America honors. The team ran a school-record time of 3:47.10, beating the previous mark by more than two seconds.
As a team, the Warriors finished ninth – WSU's best-ever NCAA finish –  with a program record 20 team points after going into the championship ranked 32nd in the nation.
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