Hoosier Hills Invitational last tune-up prior to Big Ten meet

With one week to prepare for the Big Ten Indoor Track and Field Championships, IU hosts the Hoosier Hills Invitational tonight at the Gladstein Fieldhouse.\nLast weekend, IU traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., and competed in the Tyson Foods Invitational. IU junior sprinter Ara Towns ran her best time of the season in Fayetteville with a time of 7.41 seconds in the 60-meter run.\nTowns' time provisionally qualifies her for the NCAA Indoor Championship.\nTwenty-nine schools and clubs with track and field squads are represented in tonight's meet, with the only Big Ten squad represented -- Purdue, sending athletes to compete.\nOn the national level, Towns holds the 17th fastest time in the 60-meter dash while IU senior Audrey Giesler holds the 38th-fastest time in the 3,000-meter run when she ran 9:34.70 last weekend in the Tyson Foods Invitational.\nIU senior Lauren Chesnut ranks fifth this season in the Big Ten based on her performance in the Triple Jump. Chesnut, who is taking the weekend off in the triple jump and competing in the 60-meter dash, jumped 12.62-meters last Friday at the Tyson Foods Invitational.\nOf the three meets prior to IU traveling to Iowa for the Big Ten Championship, two of these meets are at home. The Hoosier Hills Invitational is the last home indoor meet, and Chesnut said it is exciting, but is amazed at how quickly the time passed in four years.\n"This season has been a little difficult for me, I got off to a slow start, but things are coming around," Chesnut said. "This weekend is just more of training to get ready for Big Ten."\nIU sophomore thrower Andrea Dalla Rosa said she needs to focus tonight in order to perform well.\n"I don't throw well when I think too much, and it throws me off," Dalla Rosa said. "Visualization is very helpful for me, and I need to warm up like I would in practice so when I get in I can go ahead and throw."\nIU coach Randy Heisler said the team needs to get better for the Big Ten meet and in order to contest for the team title, IU needs their athletes to finish one to three places higher than their seeds.\n"We need to score some points and to score points to make a difference, you need to be in the top four, minimum, per event," Heisler said. "Otherwise, you could have everybody on our team score at the meet, but if you are scoring sixth, seventh and eighth at the end of the meet, we don't score very many points. Again, you just try to each meet (have) the people that are competing to be better than they were before, so you are higher up that food chain leading into the Big Ten meet."\n-- Contact staff writer Steve Slivka at smslivka@indiana.edu.