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  Daily Bruin File Photo Sophomore Jessica Marr races in the 800-meters.

By Christina Teller

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Three members of the women’s track and field team will make history this weekend as the squad heads to Berkeley for a meet against California, Washington and Washington State.

Senior Gina Donnelly and sophomores Julia Barbour and Melissa McBain will be the first Bruins ever to compete in the new women’s 3000-meter steeplechase event.

“It’s one of those events that stands out there and you have to have different personality to be successful. You have to embrace it,” Distance Coach Eric Peterson said of the event. “It’s the quickest way to become a star on national level if you have any accomplishment in it. It’s like pole vault a few years ago; nobody knows how to do it and not many people participating.”

It will be the first outdoor meet for most of the athletes who competed during indoors and the coaches are looking to this weekend as a gauge of where the team stands.

“We’ll use this meet to try to get a feel or idea of what athletes are going to be strong in which events,” Peterson said. “We want to move people around and also see how strong people can run right out of the gates.”

Because it is still early in the outdoor season, many athletes will still be making the transition from competing indoors to the feeling of competing outdoors again.

“It’s really a different feel because (in indoor track) everything is closed in on you and everything is really loud,” Pole Vault Coach Anthony Curran said. “You don’t have the assistance of winds that can give you a little more speed and make you feel more comfortable.”

The UCLA track and field team only has outdoor practice facilities and is primarily focused on the outdoor season. Now that the team is competing outdoors, the athletes may feel more comfortable in meet situations because they will compete in the same atmosphere they practice in.

The outdoor season opens up a handful of different events that are not part of indoor competition, including the discus throw, the hammer throw and the steeplechase.

Senior Christina Tolson, the national indoor shot put champion, will now compete in the hammer throw instead of the weight throw. Freshman Lara Saye, who redshirted indoors, will make her debut as a Bruin in the discus, hammer and shot. Freshman Jessica Cosby and sophomore Cari Soong, who placed fifth in the shot and 10th in the weight, respectively, at indoor nationals, will redshirt the 2001 outdoor season.

The 4 X 400 meter relay team will compete this weekend as well. The team of junior Bumni Ogunleeye, redshirt freshman Ysanne Williams and true freshmen Sheena Johnson and Adia McKinnon placed fifth at nationals last weekend, and according to Williams, they can only get faster from there.

“We know we’ve got another shot in the relay,” Williams said. “We can only get better if continue to run pace the pace we know we can.”