Special to the Record-Courier
Three of Kent State’s top track & field athletes will have the opportunity to live out the dream of competing on college’s biggest stage this week.
Senior Kimberley Hamilton, junior Matthew Pfleger and freshman Diana Dumitrescu represent the Golden Flashes at the 2009 NCAA Division I Track & Field Championships in Fayetteville, Ark. The event will begin today and will conclude on Saturday.
For those that think the name Pfleger sounds familiar, it is because it does. Pfleger was a standout athlete at Garfield High School that competed at the high school state track and field championships.
Now, Pfleger will attempt to push him game to an even higher level.
Pfleger was forced to wait three days to see if his hammer toss at the NCAA Mid-East Regionals in Louisville, Ky., was far enough to earn a trip to the championships. Pfleger learned from the NCAA that his toss of 60.70 meters, good enough for ninth place at the regional meet, was also good enough for him to compete for a national title. He enters the championship meet ranked 19th in the country.
Pfleger passed up the regional mark seven times and won the hammer three times during the season, including a toss of 62.03 meters that landed him a Mid-American Conference title. His season-best throw at the Campbell-Wright Open went for 64.54 meters and ranked as the 17th-best hammer toss in the nation.
Pfleger, an Academic All-MAC selection with a 3.47 grade-point average as a language arts major, will kick things off for Kent State at 10:30 a.m. today, with the qualifying round for the men’s hammer throw.
Finals of the event are slated for 1 p.m. Friday.
Hamilton, who hails from Cave Junction, Ore., continued her Cinderella season as a javelin thrower at the regional meet with a 50.19-meter heave that nailed down third place in the event. The toss at regionals was just short of Hamilton’s career-best throw of 50.27 meters at the Duke Invitational.
Dumitrescu, who ranked as the nation’s 14th-best heptathlon athlete, dominated the event throughout the season and provisionally qualified for the championships twice. The native of Campulung, Romania twice shattered 2009 Varsity “K” inductee Aja Farris’s 5,307 point total in 2000, the previous high water mark for the program in the heptathlon. Dumitrescu compiled a season-high 5,429 points to win the conference title, topping an outstanding performance earlier in the season at the 100th Drake Relays where she was the top collegiate finisher in the event and third overall with 5,350 points.