GROVE CITY, Pa. -- Two Grove City College track and field athletes have qualified for this week's NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships, which will be held Thursday through Saturday at SPIRE Institute in Geneva, Ohio.
Senior
Lydia Bennett (Bethel, Maine/Gould Academy) will represent the College in the women's 1500 meters while senior
Ryan Lenhart (New Castle, Pa./Shenango) has qualified in the men's discus.
Bennett will be the No. 6 seed in the 1500 after she posted a school-record time of 4 minutes, 25.41 seconds May 14 at the All-Atlantic Region Track and Field Championships in Williamstown, Mass.
She earned NCAA All-America honors in the mile last March at the indoor national championships by placing seventh (4:52.30) in Rochester, N.Y. Bennett also qualified for the NCAA Division III Cross Country Championships last November in Terre Haute, Ind., taking 117th in her national championships debut.
The 1500 meters preliminary heats will start at 5:50 p.m. Thursday. The finals are scheduled for 1:35 p.m. Saturday. Twelve runners will advance from the preliminaries to Saturday's final heat.
Lenhart enters the Championships as the 22nd seed with a season-best throw of 167 feet, 1 inch. Lenhart recorded that toss May 8 at Allegheny College's Marty Goldberg Invitational. That throw broke his own school record of 164-1, set March 29 at Carnegie Mellon.
This is Lenhart's first trip to the national championships in track and field. He played in three NCAA Division III playoff games as a wide receiver for the College's football team in 2023 and 2024, including catching the game-winning touchdown in the closing seconds of the Wolverines' come-from-behind 21-20 win November 18, 2023 at Susquehanna.
The men's discus will be the first event held at the Championships as action begins at 10:30 a.m. Thursday.
Bennett and Lenhart's selections mean that Grove City athletes will have competed in 11 NCAA Division III Championships on either an individual or team basis during the 2024-25 academic year.
