FAYETTEVILLE — To win the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championship for the Arkansas women in March, senior All-American Lauren Gregory ultimately sacrificed her final outdoor season.
The indoor national championship remains worth it to Arkansas and to Gregory, especially since while recovering from successful foot surgery she entered this week about to sign a unique pro contract both to run track and mountain race, Arkansas Coach Lance Harter said.
“She is going to be the first individual to try and do both,” Harter said, noting Gregory especially took to mountain racing last fall after her collegiate cross country eligibility expired in 2021.
Arkansas does pay an outdoor price minus Gregory and injured All-American distance runner Isabel Van Camp. Van Camp redshirted indoors and redshirts outdoors.
Harter tries to compensate with the SEC Outdoor Championships looming May 11-13 in Baton Rouge, La., followed by the NCAA West Prelims May 25-27 in Sacramento, Calif. Qualifiers advance to June’s NCAA Outdoor Championships.
But Gregory’s last Arkansas race, he won’t forget.
On the NCAA Indoor Friday in Albuquerque, N.M., Gregory clocked the fastest mile prelim time, then ran the meet’s fastest distance medley relay anchor. She inherited the baton in sixth place and ran the Razorbacks to eight second-place points.
In Saturday’s open mile final, Gregory, then leading, battled Olivia Howell of Illinois down the final 30 meters.
“The young lady from Illinois was coming up to challenge her again,” Harter recalled. “And you could see her [Gregory] grit trying to push more forward. She finishes (second 4:34.24 to Howell’s 4:34.00), walks off the track and says, ‘Megan [Elliott, the director of women’s track operations] I heard it pop.”
The “it” was the navicular bone in her foot, an injury she suffered in her other foot in high school at Fort Collins, Colo.
“Sure enough she severed the navicular in half,” Harter said.
Had Gregory yielded to the pain and not finished, or been overtaken by several, Arkansas doesn’t edge runner-up Texas 64-60.
The NCAA Indoor first places achieved by hurdler Ackera Nugent, pole vaulter Amanda Fassold, Britton Wilson in the 400 meters, and the meet-clinching 1,600 relay team would not have scored for a team national champion.
Retiring seven-times national champion, Hall of Fame Coach Harter spends his last season trying to muster quality distance runners complementing the superb sprinters mentored by head coach-in-waiting Chris Johnson and superb vaulters of field events coach Bryan Compton.
“To replace two repetitive All-Americans, that’s difficult to say the least,” Harter said. “Losing Lauren and redshirting Isabel definitely has put a little ding in us. We’ll go in with what we’ve got distance-wise, some people that are pretty young.”
Harter evaluated them at this week’s Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, which included his Thursday induction into the Drake Relays Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile today the women sprinters and vaulters and Coach Chris Bucknam’s NCAA Indoor champion Razorbacks men compete at the LSU Invitational in Baton Rouge.