Dakotah Keys finished 10th after a no-height in the pole vault took him out of contention to win his fourth title at the PAC-12 decathlon and heptathlon championships Saturday and Sunday, May 9-10, at UCLA’s Drake Stadium.
Arizona’s Pau Tonnesen won the event with a score of 7,823 points.
Oregon junior Mitch Modin, of Bend, finished fourth (7,417) and redshirt freshman Joe Delgado, of Ontario, was sixth (7,337).
Keys, a senior from Sweet Home, was fourth through five events with 3,965 points and opened Sunday’s competition with a second-place finish in the 110 hurdles (14.76) and sixth in the discus, which Tonnesen won. Keys was in third with 5,475 points going into the pole vault, trailing Tonnesen by 220.
He bounced back with a second-place throw in the javelin (194-9½), but against a stellar field of nationally-ranked decathletes, he couldn’t recover, finishing with 6,867 points.
Tonnesen was the first non-Oregon athlete to win the title since 2012, mainly due to Keys’ three straight championships up till this year.
Keys has qualified for the NCAA national championships June 10-11 at University of Oregon’s Hayward Field.
Katie Virtue
The Oregon Tech softball team, ranked No. 12 in the final regular-season NAIA Coaches’ Top 25 Poll, earned the two-seed in the Oregon Tech Bracket of the NAIA Softball National Championship Opening Round when the national office announced the seeding of the 10 Opening Round sites.
Sweet Home’s Katie Virtue, a freshman, is the Owls’ fourth-leading hitter, batting .391 in 190 plate appearances and a .478 on-base percentage, scoring 57 runs – second-highest on the team . She’s also second on the team in steals, with 11.
This is the fifth consecutive week the Owls were ranked No. 12 in the poll. Concordia University fell a spot to No. 17 with Corban University moving up two spots to No. 22. Concordia is the two-seed in the Oklahoma City Bracket, while Corban heads back to Klamath Falls for the Opening Round as the three-seed in the Oregon Tech Bracket.
Joining the Owls and Warriors in the four-team double-elimination Oregon Tech Bracket will be fifth ranked and top-seed Saint Xavier, Ill., along with four seed Avila, Mo.
The opening round tournament runs May 11-13 at the OIT Softball Complex on the campus of Oregon Institute of Technology.
The champions of each of the 10 Opening Round tournament sites will earn their way to Sioux City, Iowa to play in the 35th annual NAIA Softball World Series presented by Security National Bank and Morningside College.
Oregon Tech, the Cascade Collegiate Conference regular-season champions, will enter the tournament with a 41-14 overall mark. The Owls will host Corban University, the CCC tournament champion, in game one beginning at 1 p.m. on May 11.
Emily Marchbanks
At Clackamas Community College, Sweet Home alum Emily Marchbanks, a freshman, pitched the Cougars to a win over Lower Columbia on Friday, May 8, to secure a Southern Region title for the Cougars, who are 32-8.
Clackamas heads into the Northest Athletic Conference Championship Tournament May 15-18 at Delta Park in Portland, where the Cougars will seek to regain the conference championship they won in 2012. They’ve finished second the last two years.
Marchbanks is 14-5 on the season and has a 3.14 ERA.