Members of the track and field team leave Friday for Fayetteville and Saturday’s Arkansas High School Indoor Invitational where they will compete in the opening meet of 2015.

“The Arkansas track meet is one of the most competitive indoor meets around,” boys track coach Shawn Purcell said. “There are not too many places that have indoor track facilities like A&M and Arkansas.”

The meet is expected to be highly competitive with high expectations for the runners.

“We have a good group of sprinters going and a large group of distance runners, so I’m hoping we have several of them place,” Purcell said.

The athletes themselves have high goals as well.

“This will be my first time at the meet and I will be running the 3000 and the 1600,” senior Rachel Tedder said. “My goal for this meet would be to get a personal record.”

Although it’s the first meet of the year, it’s not an official school meet. Despite this, the number of athletes competing this year outnumbers that of years past.

“In the past this meet has been more of cross country athletes because they have been in shape and have been doing the workouts all fall,” Purcell said. “But we had a lot of athletes join track after Thanksgiving and we have more going this year than ever before.”

In addition to running on Saturday, track team members will get the opportunity to watch past students compete at the college level.

“The runners will go up to Arkansas on Friday and watch the UT vs. Arkansas meet and they will get to see Katie Ruhala and if Abby Tedford were healthy they would have seen her race,” cross country coach Greg Christensen said. “Then the high school teams will run on Saturday.”