Men begin indoor against Michigan

The No. 16 men's track and field team travels to Michigan Saturday to open their indoor season. There they will face No. 24 Michigan, Kent State and Michigan State in a four-way competition.\nThe low emphasis meet benefits the team as it gives coach Marshall Goss an early opportunity to assess the athletes who otherwise would not have as likely a chance for success.\n"We'll give each person an opportunity to see where they fit in with the team and the Big Ten in general," Goss said. "We use all of our meets up to the Big Ten (Championships) as a competitive opportunity to get personal records, if that's what is important, or to achieve marks for the NCAA meet. Whatever we need to do, we'll do."\nThe team will travel light in some areas, especially in distance. Only the three that are running in each event will make the trip. \n"We're not bringing up a lot of guys this weekend," freshman Sean Jefferson said. "We're going to take some guys up there and see what we can do and where we are in our training."\nOne of the team's main priorities in the meet is to stay healthy. Later in the season Goss will compete his best athletes in multiple events to maximize their productivity. For this meet, however, he will look to keep his athletes healthy.\n"We don't want to come out of this with injuries or things like that so were not going to triple or quadruple our runners," Goss said. "They're going to run their events and get ready for the next meet."\nAlready in the season the team lost a critical athlete to injury at pole vault. The roster lists five pole vaulters. But two have completed their indoor track eligibility and another is redshirting. The injury left junior Casey Friske as the only remaining pole vaulter.\n"Just on pure lack of bodies we're going to lose some points for this meet and the whole season," Friske said. "It's going to be hard to overcome and I'll just have to really work hard to get higher places to overcome the lack of points. We'll only have one body where other schools will have two or three."\nThe Hoosiers enter the season with the high expectations of a team that has a high number of returning athletes. The team finished fourth in the Big Ten Championships in last year's outdoor competition. Triple jumper Aarik Wilson finished fourth at the NCAA meet last year and earned Big Ten Freshman of the Year for outdoor track. Distance runner John Jefferson was All-American in the mile and was Big Ten Freshman of the Year for cross country this fall. Both look to add on to their success this year.\nThe team will continue competition next Saturday in a meet at West Lafayette involving Purdue and Ohio State.