MOREHEAD, Ky. – The Morehead State track & field and cross country team will compete five times inside the state of Kentucky, plus once in North Carolina, as part of the Eagles' schedule for the 2024 outdoor season, head coach
Clay Dixon has announced.
Most of the meets are repeats from the past few seasons, but a few are either new or returning to the schedule after a handful of years away.
The slate features annual trips to the Jim Vargo Bellarmine Invitational, the Jim Green Invitational (at the University of Kentucky) and the Rick Erdmann Invitational (at Eastern Kentucky University), as well as a second meet at EKU (the EKU Open); and jaunts to Alexandria, Ky., for the Northern Kentucky Invitational and North Carolina for the Charlotte 49er Classic. The season will conclude with the Ohio Valley Conference Championships at Eastern Illinois in Charleston, Ill.
The Eagles' first competition is the Charlotte 49er Classic, which will take place Thursday-Saturday, March 14-16, at UNC Charlotte. MSU last participated in the meet in 2019. It will be the fourth consecutive year the Eagles will open their season on the third weekend of March, but the earliest starting date since 2016, when the teams competed at the Birmingham Southern Invitational on March 11-12. In both 2018 and 2019, Morehead State's first outdoor meet was the 49er Classic.
"We're excited to make a return to Charlotte," coach Dixon said. "It will be nice to hopefully open the season with some warm weather and get some good early season marks to jump start the outdoor season."
On Thursday, March 21, the team will travel to Richmond for the EKU Open. MSU competed at Eastern Kentucky last spring, but that was at the Rick Erdmann Twilight Invitational in late April. According to available information, it will be the first time the Eagles will participate in two outdoor meets in the same season at EKU.
The Blue and Gold will take a week off, before returning for the Jim Vargo Bellarmine Invitational on Friday, April 5. It will be the third straight year the Eagles will compete at the meet. Last spring, both teams placed 11th.
Morehead State will make its first-ever appearance at Northern Kentucky University for the Northern Kentucky Invitational on Saturday, April 13. The meet will be held on the track at nearby Bishop Brossart High School in Alexandria. Traveling to Northern Kentucky will not be a first, since MSU did run at NKU in its season-opening cross country race this fall.
"NKU will be fun, since we have so many people from the Northern Kentucky area," said coach Dixon. "It will be within 15 minutes for four or five people on the team that grew up in that area."
The next two meets are both two-day affairs. The Jim Green Invitational at Kentucky will be on Friday and Saturday, April 19-20, and the Rick Erdmann Invitational will follow on Friday and Saturday, April 26-27. It will be the second consecutive season MSU has traveled to the meet in Richmond, Ky., and the fifth straight time the competition at UK appears on the schedule, although the Eagles did not run in the spring of 2020, due to Covid-19.
Neither meet has been scored during the years in which the Eagles participated.
The OVC Outdoor Track & Field Championships return to Eastern Illinois for the first time since 2021. This year's meet will take place on Thursday-Saturday, May 9-11. Last spring, the men finished ninth and the women 10th.
The NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships will take place from June 5-8 in Eugene, Ore.
