East side schools head to Moscow, Idaho Friday for Lauren McCluskey Memorial Meet...
Action gets underway with the multi-events at 9 am, with a pause at 3 pm for the official ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony of the Lauren McCluskey track.
Individual events will begin after the dedication ceremony, starting with the women's long jump at 4 p.m. and men's mile at 4:30. The final event on Friday will be the men's 5000-meter final at 6:40.
Competition will restart on Saturday morning with more of the men's heptathlon, including the 60-meter hurdles at 9 a.m. and pole vault at 9:45. Qualifying for men's and women's 60-meter races will begin at 11:10 a.m. to kick off Saturday's running events.
McCluskey (Howard Lao photo), a Pullman HS grad and University of Utah track athlete, was killed on the University of Utah campus in the fall of 2018 in a domestic violence incident.
While growing up in Pullman, she often trained at the Kibbie Dome as part of the Pullman Comets youth team.
Matt & Jill McCluskey received settlement funds from the University of Utah and its insurers, who acknowledged that they should have done more to protect Lauren. The family has pledged to donate the entire settlement to support the missions of the Lauren McCluskey Foundation, which include improving campus safety, supporting amateur athletics and animal welfare. The donation to the University of Idaho is directly from the McCluskeys and not from the Lauren McCluskey Foundation.
The McCluskey Memorial features a number of Division I teams, namely from the Big Sky Conference, as this meet will be a preview of the Big Sky indoor championships in late February, which the University of Idaho will host.
The Cougars will send a number of athletes across the state line, but will not send their hurdle group nor their distance runners.
Eastern Washington will send most of their squad to Moscow, while Gonzaga is sending only their women's team, as the men will compete at next week's UW Invitational in Seattle.
Central Washington will send 33 athletes to the meet, as they look to get and/or improve upon their marks as they make the march to the GNAC indoor chanpionships next month in Spokane.
ESPN+ ($) will stream both days of the McCluskey Memorial. Live results of the McCluskey Memorial are available here.
OTHER MEETS THIS WEEKEND...
In Richmond, Virginia, Allie Buchalski, Allie Ostrander, and Dillon Maggard look to place themselves on the squad for next month's World Athletics cross country championships as they compete in the USA Cross Country Championships at Pole Green Park, starting at 9:30 am Pacific.
The top six finishers across the line in the 10k races will select themselves for the United States squad that will compete at the world cross country championships in Bathurst, Australia.
The Huskies' Evan Jenkins and Jamar Distel, who were both redshirted last fall, will look to put themselves on the place to Bathurst with a top 6 finish in the Under-20 8k championship race.
USATF.tv ($) will offer live streaming of the event. The link to live results is here.
In Iowa City, Iowa, Washington alum Olivia Gruver competes on the first stop of the 2023 American Track League tour Saturday at the Puma ATL Hawkeye Pro Classic at the Hawkeye Indoor Track complex.
Gruver is part of a ten-woman field in the pole vault, which gets underway at 3:45 pm Pacific.
Also in the meet is Washington State alum CJ Allen, who will run the rarely contested 400 meter hurdles, which consists of eight hurdles, three of which are run in lanes before making the break to start the second lap like a regular 400 on an indoor track.
The start list for the Puma ATL Hawkeye Pro Classic is available here. Streaming ($) is available through the ATL's Vimeo page, which can be accessed through the ATL site.
NOTE: The sports information offices of Washington State University, the University of Idaho, Eastern Washington University, Central Washington University, Gonzaga University, the University of Idaho, USA Track & Field and the American Track League contributed to this report.
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