Lakers Shatter Personal Records At Green & White Invite

WAUWATOSA, Wis. – Nine different Roosevelt track & field athletes set personal records Saturday at the Green & White Invite hosted by Wisconsin Lutheran at Raabe Stadium in Wauwatosa, Wis.

Among the personal records that fell were Aaron Rodriguez in the long jump and Kieran Cassidy in the javelin throw. Both athletes also set the initial school record in those events by debuting them at the meet for the first time in program history. Rodriguez jumped 18 feet and ¼ inches in his inaugural go at the long jump while Cassidy scored four points for the Lakers with his throw of 122 feet and 2 inches landing him in fifth position overall.

The women also set school records in the field events as Lola Arreola smashed the school record in the shot put while Juliana Balagat set her personal bests in the shot put and discus. Arreola toss of nearly 27 feet is the new mark in the shot put, which debuted for the Lakers earlier this season with both Arreola and Balagat competing. Balagat's shot put of 23 feet and 6 inches was her best effort by nearly a foot then her discus toss of 58 feet and 6 inches was nine feet longer than her previous personal record.

The records continued to fall on the track for the Lakers runners as the women also racked up some impressive point totals. Angela Louis breezed through in fifth place in the preliminaries of the 100-meter dash before beating her seed time but finishing sixth in the finals. After collecting her three points in the 100, Louis bested her personal record in the 200 meters with a time of 27.57 seconds. In the 400-meter hurdles, Monse Morales set her personal best with a time of 1:29.06, just missing out on scoring additional points for the Lakers.

Roosevelt's other nine points on the women's side came from the legs of Beatrice Bruno, who surprised many in her second track meet of the season. In the 400 meters, Bruno did not have a seed time so she ran in the second of the two heats. However, she not only won her heat by more than four seconds, her time of 1:04.5 earned her a fifth-place finish overall, beating out roughly half of the first-heat runners. She then obliterated her seed time in the 800 meters by five seconds to set a personal record with a time of 2:28.53, good enough for five points and a fourth-place finish in front of four runners with faster seed times than her.

On the track for the men, Raul Ortiz and Matt James beat their previous best times in the 1,500 meters, both edging out their previous bests by less than a second. Ortiz finished his run in 5:04.65 while James was right behind him in 5:06.94. Roosevelt finished with just seven points total as a team on the men's side with the other three points coming from Brandon Saavedra's sixth-place finish in the 5,000 meters.

The road to the conference championships heats up Saturday when the Lakers take to the track against many conference rivals at the ONU Tiger Open hosted by Olivet Nazarene.