BUFFALO, NY - Eight University at Buffalo track and field athletes will compete this weekend at the NCAA East Regional Championships in Fairfax, VA with the chance to move on to the NCAA Championships next month. Approximately 1,200 athletes from more than 100 Division I programs on the east coast will compete.

Four men's athletes, weight throwers Byron McKinney (Amherst, NY/Sweet Home) and Keith Gentes (Warwick, RI/Bishop Hendricken), sprinter Joe Clark (Amherst, NY/Sweet Home) and distance runner Jerimie Slick (Rochester, NY/Greece-Olympia), earned qualifying marks from earlier in the season for the regionals.

Jerimie Slick

Earning a trip to the George Mason University-hosted event for the UB women are weight thrower Faith Thompson (Niagara Falls, NY/Niagara Falls), pole vaulter Laura Olson (Lyons, NY/Lyons), triple jumper Biaunca McFarland (Binghamton, NY/Binghamton) and middle-distance runner Christina Keck (Erie, PA/McDowell).

McKinney will compete in the shot put after registering a school record and top qualifying mark of 56-5.75 to finish third at the Mid-American Conference Championships.

Gentes set his qualifying hammer throw mark of 190-7 at the UB Chancellor's Cup meet in April, attaining a UB record in the process. He placed second in the event at the MAC Championships with a toss of 190-5 and earned Second-Team All-MAC honors with the effort.

Clark will race in the 400-meters after posting a 47.30 clocking at the UB Chancellor's Cup. He holds the school record in both the 200- and 400-meter races, setting both standards in the 2002 season.

Slick, who competed in the 2001 NCAA Cross Country Championships, will have a chance to make the field of a second national championship this weekend. Slick earned a spot in the regionals with his impressive performance in the 5,000-meters at Philadelphia's Penn Relays in April. The distance specialist turned in a 14:14.54 time to shatter the school record by nearly 20 seconds.

Thompson will compete in two events, having qualified in both the shot put and hammer throws. She met the standards for both events several times during the year and currently has top marks of 46-8, a UB school record, in the shot put and 179-0 in the hammer throw. She placed fifth in both events at the MAC Championships earlier this month.

Laura Olson

Olson has consistently rewritten the UB pole vault mark, establishing a new record nearly every time she headed down the runway in 2003. Olson won her first MAC Championship title with a school-record height of 13-1.75 (4.01m) to take the event by nearly four inches over Akron's Kira Sims. Olson has improved on the pole vault record by more than a foot and a half during the outdoor season.

McFarland holds the school triple jump record at 42-0.50, set with her winning leap at the 2002 MAC Championships. She attained this season's top mark of 41-5 at the UB Chancellor's Cup. Also a sprinter, she anchored three record-setting relay teams in 2003.

Keck will compete in the 800-meters, turning in a qualifying time of 2:10.15 at the Akron Quad meet. The time was a quarter-second off the school record. Keck broke the 10-year old record in the 1,500-meters at the same meet but fell short of meeting the regional qualifying standard.

This is the first season that the NCAA will use regional meets to determine the field for the national championships, to be held June 11-14 in Sacramento, CA. Four regional meets (East, Fairfax, VA; Mideast, Columbus, OH; Midwest, Lincoln, NE; West, Stanford, CA) will be held this weekend. The top five finishers in each event, plus the next eight top performances from the four regionals, will comprise the 28-entrant field for national competition. Previously, the NCAA used a format of automatic and provisional qualifying marks. All individuals who attained an automatic mark made the NCAA field with the remainder filled by the best provisional marks attained until all spots were filled.