For several members of the ISU men’s and women’s track teams, Saturday is the last chance to qualify for the NCAA Indoor Championships next weekend.

To qualify for the championships, competitors will be concerned with reaching an automatic qualifying time, not with placement against other competitors. There will be many quality teams looking for qualifying spots, however, as men’s and women’s top-25 teams Arkansas, Oregon and TCU will send athletes, along with Texas Tech, Kentucky, Arizona State and Nebraska.

Iowa State is one of six sites to host a qualifying meet.

“This meet is by far the best one,” said men’s coach Steve Lynn. “You’ll have more people qualify here than in any other last-chance meet. It’s a heck of a meet to come check out.”

David Rotich will try to accomplish a mile time under four minutes to receive an automatic qualifying time in the mile run.

Rotich will compete with Arkansas runner Ahmed Said, who ran an automatic qualifying mile of under four minutes last year at this meet.

“It will be a really strong race, but he can run under four minutes,” Lynn said.

Tony Douglas will look for a jump of more than 25 feet in the long jump in order to qualify. Douglas would have had that mark last week at the Big 12 Championships with his first jump, but was disqualified.

“Tony [Douglas]’s really ready to do it, because he jumped really far at conference, but we had the problem,” said jumps and vaults coach Ron McEachran.

Lynn said he would love to see strong fan support for Rotich and Douglas, who will be competing in the last home meet of their Cyclone careers.

“To have people there clapping and yelling for those guys would be especially good,” Lynn said.

Elijah Braimah will compete in the 400-meter dash, needing a time of 46.05 to get an automatically qualify. Other Cyclones will compete just for experience.

“We’ve got a lot of guys where we just want to get personal records, and then have that slingshot us to getting ready to go into the outdoor season,” Lynn said.

The women hope to qualify up to four people for the NCAA meet. Rebecca Williams is one of them, needing a time of 8.15 in the 60-meter hurdles.

“She’s going to have to improve about a tenth of a second to get into the national meet,” said sprints, hurdles, and multi-events coach Scott Roberts. “We’re going to be pushing for that, we’re treating it like a championship week. We’re taking it pretty light and just doing some quick stuff and getting ready for that.”

Elsewhere, Ada Anderson will run her final home meet at Iowa State. Anderson has already qualified for the NCAA meet, but doesn’t want to take a week off.

“We’ll kind of treat this as a training week for her – there’ll be good competition there, it’ll be good therapy after the Big 12 meet,” Roberts said. “She had a great race at the Big 12s, and we really want to carry that over.”

In the pentathlon, Erica Lynn is sitting in 23rd place for provisional qualifiers, a spot that will need to be improved on to reach the NCAA meet.

Jummy Alowonle will also compete for a spot in the long jump. Most others will sit out until the outdoor season.

“Some ended with a real good meet last weekend; we want them to finish that season on a high note, rather than maybe not do as well as they did last weekend,” said women’s coach Dick Lee.

The first event will be the women’s pole vault at 10:30 a.m.