Illinois State track and field qualified 10 individual student-athletes and one relay squad for the 2026 NCAA West First Round, which will take place May 27-30 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The meet will be streamed on ESPN+.
The NCAA postseason features two first rounds—one for the east region and one for the west region. Qualifiers from each region advance to the 2026 NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, scheduled for June 10-13. The top 12 competitors from each individual event and the top 12 teams from each relay event move forward. The list of qualifiers from each event will be announced by Sunday, May 31, at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, with final championship participants confirmed by Tuesday, June 2, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.
The Redbirds earned a total of eleven entries into this round: four women’s qualifiers, six men’s individual selections, and the men’s 4×400-meter relay team. On the women’s side, Becca Heitzig is ranked twenty-second in the West Region in the 1500-meter run with a time of 4:14.76; Pauline Schedler is ranked twenty-sixth in that event at 4:15.89; Mattison Plummer is sixteenth in the region’s steeplechase with a mark of 10:07.06; Macee Rivers is eighteenth in the hundred-meter hurdles at thirteen point nineteen seconds.
For Illinois State’s men, Zach Paul enters ranked twenty-first in the hundred-meter dash with a school-record time of ten point fifteen seconds; Reece Curtis is forty-fifth in the two-hundred-meter dash at twenty point sixty-three seconds; Voldy Makabu qualified thirtieth in high jump after clearing two point fourteen meters; Seth Nelson is ranked twenty-eighth in pole vault at five point three meters; Garrett Taylor qualified both thirty-second (shot put) and thirty-sixth (discus); Jacob Klink also competes in shot put as forty-second qualifier.
The men’s four-by-four-hundred meter relay squad—Paul, Enyinnaya Nwagwu Jr., Jake Welch, Reece Curtis—with Jaiden Reed as alternate enters twelfth with their season-best time of three minutes five point twenty-seven seconds.
Earlier this month at Missouri Valley Conference Outdoor Championships on May seventeen, Illinois State men secured their first outdoor team title since nineteen ninety-nine by winning four individual titles plus a relay championship en route to finishing ahead of Northern Iowa and Indiana State. Several athletes broke or tied school records during this season—including Paul (hundred-meter dash), Nelson (pole vault), Heitzig (women’s fifteen hundred meters), as well as both men’s relays—which are detailed alongside other program milestones on GoRedbirds.com.
According to the official website, Illinois State Redbirds benefit from initiatives such as its Athletics Excellence Fund supporting competitiveness and recruitment efforts across multiple sports programs.
