Jan. 25, 2013

SEATTLE - With the rust shaken off over the first pair of meets, Stanford begins the indoor track and field season in earnest, beginning Friday at the two-day UW Invitational.

Chris Miltenberg, Stanford's Franklin P. Johnson Director of Track and Field, brings 41 athletes - the Cardinal's largest contingent for a meet yet -- and his entire coaching staff to Dempsey Indoor track on the University of Washington campus. There will be 24 Stanford women and 17 men.

The meet will have more than 1,000 NCAA Division I athletes and has higher entrance standards than the opening UW Indoor Preview on the same flat 307-meter track. The top men's teams competing are No. 5 Oregon, No. 17 BYU, No. 18 Stanford, and No. 20 UCLA. The top women's teams are No. 3 Oregon, No. 8 Washington, No. 11 California, and No. 14 Stanford.

The meet includes the anticipated hurdles debut of Kori Carter and Katie Nelms, the juniors who already are the fastest female hurdlers in Stanford history, both indoors and outdoors. Carter is the defending Mountain Pacific Sports Federation 60-meter hurdles indoor champ and the Pac-12 100 hurdles outdoor champ, with Nelms second in the latter race and on the school's all-time lists.

The meet will serve as good training weekend for Stanford, with many athletes competing in multiple events. Nelms, for example, could race in as many as four races within a span of 1 hour, 43 minutes on Saturday morning, with prelims and finals scheduled for both the 60-meter dash and 60 hurdles. And she could run a fifth race Saturday, in the invitational 4x400 relay.

Among the unique features of the meet is a pentathlon, a Friday five-event competition that will feature Stanford sophomore Madeline Treasure, who will compete in the 60-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, long jump, and 800. Treasure enters the season at No. 4 on Stanford's all-time indoor list in the pentathlon, with 3,534 points, scored at last year's MPSF championships.

Geoffrey Tabor, a senior shot putter, is the only Stanford athlete competing in his third meet of the season, and will attempt to remain undefeated in 2013 after capturing first in the UW Indoor Preview on Jan. 11 and the Cherry & Silver Invitational in Albuquerque, N.M., last week, where he threw a season-best 56-7½.

One athlete will be making her collegiate debut - freshman middle-distance runner Hannah Brown, a three-time Virginia AA state champion out of Blacksburg High School.

Competition for Stanford begins on Friday at 2 p.m. and Saturday at 10 a.m.

Results